40 Nights: Shinichi and Shiho
by Eeveebeth Fejvu
Summary: By sharing their joys, sorrows, and fears, an indefinable and eternal bond was forged. Forty themes for the Detective of Light and the Girl from the Darkness. /On Hiatus/
1. The End

**40 Nights: Shinichi and Shiho**

By Eeveebeth Fejvu

* * *

This collection of one-shots is dedicated to the Aicoholics (you know who you are) from the community on LiveJournal, and to all ConanAi fans everywhere. Without your support, I probably wouldn't have attempted this huge challenge. Thanks especially to my beta reader, Rae, who is totally awesome and a great editor. I hope you enjoy these stories of complex friendship and ambiguous love.

* * *

**Fandom: **Detective Conan

**Title: **The End

**Author: **Eeveebeth Fejvu

**Theme: **#26 – Frozen moment at the first sight

**Pairing/Characters**: Kudo Shinichi and Miyano Shiho

**Rating:** K

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Detective Conan_. I requested Haibara to make me a pill that would somehow turn me into the creator of the shrunken tantei-san, but my order is in line behind the antidote to Apoptoxin-4869. …So, for now, I write fan fiction.

**Summary:** It occurred to him that he had never truly seen her in this form.

* * *

It was over.

As Shinichi stood silently amidst the rubble of what had once been the lobby of the Haido City Hotel, he finally realized what the strange, almost forgotten feeling was that had washed over him. It was peace.

The endless nightmare was over.

All around him, however, smoke from the last explosion was still streaming out from underneath the mounds of crumbled plaster and slabs of broken concrete. Loose electrical lines, flung by the blasts across the iron beams that kept the remainder of the ceiling intact, flickered with blue sparks as they swung gently in the light breeze that wafted in from the holes in the wall. He could hear the sirens of fire trucks and ambulances in the distance, and the sirens of police cruisers just outside on the street, their blue lights flicking into view through the fissures.

This latest encounter with the Black Organization was undoubtedly the final one. The syndicate had been destroyed, utterly obliterated at long last, in a single massive clash between agents of the American FBI and the entire criminal consortium. Ever since their capture of Kir, the FBI had picked up clue after clue concerning their target. More members had been drawn out of the woodwork – many of those captured as well – until the FBI had grown certain that the Organization was crumbling, collapsing from within. More and more evidence of a fissure within the Organization's ranks came to light. The members, with their differing opinions on how the syndicate should be run, were turning against each other. It was a fatal mistake; the FBI was finally prepared to go in for the kill.

It had been bad fortune that what had started out as a raid on a likely hideout had spilled out onto the highways of Tokyo. Akai Shuichi, with his insider knowledge and phenomenal ability to predict, had warned them against a street fight, after all. And there had been many casualties, as the FBI agent had anticipated; luckily, though, few innocents had been affected and the majority of the casualties had been on the Organization's side.

The light breeze tugged at the corners of his untidy, unbuttoned blazer and toyed with the bent collar of the white shirt underneath. He reminded himself that, once things had truly settled down, he needed to offer to pay for the damage done to his current outfit. He had borrowed it from an FBI agent who also wore this sort of attire, but now it was covered in rips, dust from the collapse, and spots of his own dried blood, which was obviously no condition to return an outfit in.

Absentmindedly, he ran his left hand up and down his right arm. He was scratched rather minimally here compared to some of the deeper cuts on his face and his chest, but this arm hurt the worst. When his father taught him how to shoot in Hawaii, Yusaku had never informed him just how numb his body could become if he continued to clutch and use the weapon for hours at a time, each shot sending a deep vibration from his fingertips to his shoulder.

He had only shot to defend himself, of course, for he was still the unsanctioned detective he had always been, not a cop or federal agent. The FBI hadn't been allowed the same luxury. He wondered especially what Jodie and Akai were thinking right now. The string of events that Sharon Vineyard had started so many years ago by killing a little girl's parents had come full circle as that grown-up little girl had finally finished off a murderer named Vermouth. Akai Shuichi had proved himself a worthy avenger as well, by ridding the world of his beloved's executioner, Gin.

Massaging his aching right hand, Shinichi found that he himself wasn't sure what to think about the deaths of Vermouth and Gin, the two members he knew the best. The oldest part of him, the very 'Shinichi' part of him, was almost glad – no prison time could ever do real justice to the lives those two had utterly and indifferently destroyed.

But another part of him, what he thought of now as the newer 'Conan' part, wished that he had been able to talk to Vermouth one more time, to ask her why she had chosen to give up her life as a famous actress for the life of a criminal. And the Conan part of him that Shinichi didn't even want to acknowledge wished that _he_ had been the one to finish off Gin, rather than Akai. The FBI agent wasn't the only one whose ultimate grudge was against the longhaired blond.

Across the large lobby and through the swirling smoke, Shinichi watched James Black's bedraggled army of FBI cluster together as they waited for the ambulances to arrive. They were chatting animatedly now, in Japanese and English and a most bizarre mix of both, as opposed to earlier when all had been as serious as the grave. There was a great deal of back-patting and happy exclamations among the disheveled agents as well. Though he was not officially one of them, he still felt himself swell with pride to have worked with them.

Then, he almost laughed. There was Jodie; he could see her short blonde hair from all the way across the lobby. She was celebrating with her usual enthusiasm, jumping around and clapping and yelling happy expressions in English as she embraced her fellow FBI agents. Shinichi was pleased to see that the uncharacteristically tired daze she had been in after Vermouth's death had evaporated. After a moment of grinning, Shinichi laughed as Jodie pounced upon Akai, who had just made his nonchalant appearance, and enveloped the bewildered agent in a hug, crying, "We did it, Shu!"

Grinning once more, he shut his eyes, trying to preserve this moment of celebration and accomplishment. It was over, finally over. It was still hard to believe; it probably would be for a while. "_Hey, Cool Guy_!" He opened his eyes. Jodie had finally spotted him standing by himself on the far side of the lobby and was waving furiously at him, her glasses threatening to fall off of her nose and her free arm draped in camaraderie about the deadpanning Shuichi's shoulder. Leisurely, he raised his hand and waved back, and he began to walk toward them as he saw her beckoning him to join in the FBI's energized huddle.

But suddenly, a strange feeling that he was forgetting something came over him. Realizing what it was, he glanced around.

It was her.

He paused. She was standing alone beside a small pile of rubble, her lithe arms crossed tightly across her chest and her elegant shoulders hunched as if trying to keep herself warm. The light breeze sifting in from outside was playing with the ends of her short, strawberry blonde hair, tossing them lightly around her slender face. She was staring off into the distance, past the congregation of American agents, towards something Shinichi had never been able to see. She had been standing there so motionlessly that he hadn't even noticed her until now.

It occurred to him, as he stood frozen in silence, that he had never truly seen her in this form, this adult form, before. It was like seeing her for the very first time, really. That single time before did not count, when he had watched in horror as she fell helplessly into the bloodstained snow on the roof of this same building, Gin shooting furiously at her. There had been too much going on for him to get a good look at her then. And even after taking the completed antidote only a few hours ago, they had barely had a chance to speak in person, and most of that time they had been hiding and waiting in the dark.

But now, Shinichi could see her clearly. The dull red sweater and black pants that Jodie had come up with for her seemed to fit her quite well. Her adult form was rather well developed, with slender arms and legs unlike Ran's athletically toned limbs, but somewhat like Ran in the chest and, well… Shinichi blushed even thinking about such things, but it was hard not to. Her mature facial features fit her so much better as an adult than as a child. Though cut and bruised in several places, she seemed like an exquisitely beautiful china doll – a comparison she would certainly not appreciate if he were to voice his opinion.

A series of happy cries regained his attention, and he glanced back to the assembly of FBI agents. Jodie, still hanging off of Shuichi, was shouting exuberantly out through the large opening that had been blasted in the front wall. The lights of the police cruisers flashing in through the fissures cast the figures making their way into the lobby into silhouettes. After a moment, Shinichi recognized who those shapes must be.

It was the Beika district police. He could see the figures of Meguire-keibu, Satou, Takagi, Shiratori, Chiba, and Yumi, and after a moment, he recognized what had to be Heiji, Kogoro, and Yusaku following behind them. And there behind those last three men were, Shinichi thought with a grin, the women to back them up: Kazuha, Eri, and Yukiko. After them, three small shapes and a larger one came into view – the Shonen Tantei and Agasa-hakase. All of his most precious people were coming to the lobby, though no doubt only a select few understood exactly what had occurred and the enormity of it. Nevertheless, it would not be long before the Black Organization and its downfall would become well known.

One hell of a party is sure to break out now, Shinichi thought with a chuckle. Jodie was still calling to the new arrivals through the lively chatter of the FBI. Shinichi did not hear any of her salutations clearly until one particularly enthusiastic English cry seemed to break through the commotion.

"_Hey, Angel!_"

Ran! He started in surprise. She was here as well, then, coming to meet the victorious band of federal agents… and him. She would have heard him talking to the FBI agents over the radio that the police department had unintentionally tapped during the middle of their operation, he was sure. But there was so much that she didn't know yet – mainly, of course, the fact that he, her childhood friend Kudo Shinichi, had been hiding under her nose as her adopted little brother ever since that fateful night at Tropical Land.

His feet took several steps forward, toward the crowd and toward where Ran was surely going to appear at any time. But he couldn't stop his attention from reverting back to the woman who had also distanced herself from the celebration. She was standing just as she had been a moment before, arms crossed and face impassive.

Shinichi almost called out to her, the words on his tongue and ready to come out, when it dawned on him that there was no one to greet 'Miyano Shiho,' now that the darkness had passed. There would have been someone to greet 'Haibara Ai' – Ayumi, Mitsuhiko, Genta, Agasa-hakase. Even 'Sherry' might have received a reception from the man who had once been called 'Rye'. But the strawberry blonde was no longer either of these people: Sherry had died with the fall of the Black Organization, and Ai had died upon taking the antidote for Apoptoxin-4869. Only the original person, Miyano Shiho, remained, but with her parents and Akemi dead, there was no one still alive to remember the younger sister.

Shinichi suddenly found himself torn. Ran, the girl who had waited for him for so long, was still waiting for him, waiting for him to find her amongst the celebrating crowd. But Shiho, the girl who had waited for this day for so long, was still waiting too, waiting to be acknowledged and received by someone, anyone. With a noise of frustration, Shinichi glanced back and forth from the strawberry blonde to the silhouette of Ran that had suddenly broken from the incoming throng. Quickly, he made a decision. After all, which girl really needed him more right now?

In quick strides, he made his way towards her, setting a smile onto his face. As he came to stand beside her, her striking eyes lifted to meet. She didn't smile in return, but he refused to let it faze him.

"Why aren't you celebrating, Kudo Shinichi?" Shiho asked. "Look at what you have accomplished. The party is waiting for you to complete them." Her voice was a touch deeper than the one he was used to, but the melodic tone and inflection of it he knew by heart. Just as her facial features seemed a better fit now, this mature sound did as well.

"I'm not the only one they're waiting for," he replied, still smiling.

"They are not waiting for me," she said, turning her eyes away from his to stare out once again into the distance. For a long moment there was silence between them. Shinichi felt the smile fade off of his face into a frown.

"I know," he finally began, "I know… that they don't really know you yet, not… _this_ way, but they will. They will soon enough." When this failed to produce any reaction, he continued, "I know it probably would have been easier if you were still Haibara Ai, but… well… Sherry has been erased, and Haibara Ai died so that Miyano Shihocould live, you know. And Miyano Shiho was the one who helped save us all from the darkness. What has been accomplished here, what they are celebrating, could never have come to pass without Miyano Shiho, so… the party won't be complete without you."

After a moment, her eyes seemed to soften. "You seem to have all of my… _aliases_ categorized neatly," she remarked, irony tingeing her tone.

Shinichi smiled sheepishly. "There wasn't much else to think about when we were waiting in the dark, you know. And I think I've sorted out my own, too. Having to act the polite little kid all of the time, well… Edogawa Conan really became his own person, a person I know that _I_ should learn a lot from."

"One can only be so arrogant when one is three feet tall, eh?" she teased, staring him in the eye. "…Not that I would know first-hand if Kudo Shinichiis really the arrogant glory hound I used to read about in the newspapers. After all, I may have always referred to you as Kudo-kun, but that does not mean I know Kudo Shinichi any more than they, or you, know Miyano Shiho."

Generously ignoring the fact that she had just called him 'arrogant' (twice!) and a 'glory hound,' Shinichi replied, "Should I introduce myself then?"

"The famous Kudo Shinichi, Great Detective of the East, hardly needs an introduction," she said mockingly. "Though I must say… you looked a lot better in the picture the Organization had attached to your file."

Shinichi stared down at the ripped, dusty, bloodied blue suit he wore, then shot her an annoyed look. "Oi!"

He was pleased when his exclamation brought a smirk to her lips. Surprisingly, the expression looked less severe and more playful on her adult face.

"Miyano Shiho hardly needs an introduction either," he said. "After all, I've heard all about you from your 'distant cousin' Haibara Ai through her close friendship with Edogawa Conan, who is my 'distant cousin.'"

"…I trust all you've heard has been good, then?"

"Sure," he drawled sarcastically, and then said, suddenly serious, "though I have to say… I, Kudo Shinichi, would like to get to know you better, Miyano Shiho." From the look on her face, it seemed as if she was about to say something risqué concerning his word choice, but then thought better of it hearing the sincerity in his voice. He continued, "And though I have met you myself, there are many others you've yet to meet, and I'd be honored to make the introductions."

She was quiet for a moment, contemplating his offer as she let her arms relax from their crossed position. Finally, she said, "_She _is looking for you, Kudo-kun."

Shinichi was suddenly aware of the sound of his name being shouted. Ran was calling for him, searching desperately amongst the throng for the young man who had been missing from her life for so long.

As tough as it was, Shinichi refused to allow Shiho's change of subject to distract him. "I'm not joining them without you. …I promise you, there _is _a place for you there! Even if someone wanted to deny you a place among us, I wouldn't let them. You're one of us, Miyano-san. I promise you, you belong here."

Shiho remained quiet, staring off into the distance, through the rising smoke, beyond the jubilant crowd, between the fissures in the wall, past the flashing blue lights. For a moment, Shinichi looked off into the distance himself, seeing if he could catch a glimpse of what she saw. As always, he never did. He turned his stare back to her, waiting stubbornly for a reply. Finally, she sighed in resignation.

"A boy named Edogawa Conan once promised a girl named Haibara Ai that he would protect her from harm," she spoke softly, "and that promise was fulfilled. So I suppose if Kudo Shinichi promises Miyano Shiho there is a place for her here, with his people and himself, then _he_ is not promising lightly either."

"There is only one truth," Shinichi replied, "and that is it."

Shiho smiled, and the allure of her smile caused him to blush. She held out her hand to him.

"Lead the way, Kudo-kun."

He took her hand, and he didn't let go.


	2. Threads of Fate

**Fandom: **Detective Conan

**Title: **Threads of Fate

**Author: **Eeveebeth Fejvu

**Theme: **#37 – Threads of Fate

**Pairing/Characters: **Edogawa Conan and Haibara Ai

**Rating:** K

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Detective Conan_. I requested Haibara to make me a pill that would somehow turn me into the creator of the shrunken tantei-san, but my order is in line behind the antidote to Apoptoxin-4869. …So, for now, I write fan fiction.

**Summary:** You think it's impossible to be born with a shared destiny?

**Author's Note: **This particular story, "Threads of Fate," won the award for "Best Fan Fiction in the Adult Division 2007" at my local bookstore's manga party. Pretty cool, ne?

* * *

"Wait, Ayumi-chan, you have to- That's right…" Ran sat back in her seat on the couch as the preteen girl corrected the difficult stitch she had been struggling with. Ayumi smiled in delight, then quickly grew serious again as she fiddled with the long twin needles, which created a pinging sound Conan found highly annoying every time they clattered together.

"Can't you do that more quietly, Ayumi-chan?" Genta grumbled in his gruff voice, absentmindedly stuffing another rice ball into his mouth. His eyes had been glued to the flickering television screen for the last hour and a half.

Mitsuhiko laughed. "Genta-kun, I think you're too absorbed in this movie. After all, it's not even an adventure movie or a horror movie; it's a romance – oof!" His playful teasing was silenced by a thwack from a pillow.

"You're watching this too, stupid," Genta retorted, not looking away from the screen.

"Yeah, well, I didn't choose it." Mitsuhiko held the pillow to his chest and placed his chin on top. "Ayumi-chan and Ran-neechan did."

"Ran-neechan saw this movie a few years ago in the theatres, right?" Ayumi asked, pausing in her endeavor to look up at the young woman.

"That's right," Ran nodded, smiling wistfully down at the red yarn in her lap. "I went to see it with Shinichi on his birthday, but it didn't exactly… work out as planned."

"That's when the theatre complex blew up?" Ayumi inquired. Ran nodded.

"I remember that," Genta muttered through a rice ball.

"I went to watch it later with Sonoko-chan, because Shinichi had to… to go back to the case he was on," Ran's smile weakened. "It's still a very good movie, though."

"I like it a lot," Ayumi commented, blushing, and hastily returned to her work-in-progress.

"Too mushy," was Mitsuhiko's assessment. A moment later, he ducked as Genta's swatting hand flew over his head.

"What do you think, Conan-kun?" Ran asked, trying to get the silent boy into the conversation.

Sitting on the floor, Conan shrugged, but felt himself squirming about on the inside. This movie was too personal to him to be watched with a group.

"Ai-chan?"

Without raising her eyes from the magazine she had been perusing since the movie had been started, the strawberry blonde made a noncommittal noise and left it at that.

Conan snickered to himself. He had caught Ai up late at night a few weeks before, wrapped in a blanket and watching this movie alone in the dark. Unbeknownst to her, he had stood behind her, leaning on the couch, and watched the movie with her until the credits were over. Then, surprising her, he had leaned over her shoulder to question her choice of entertainment. She had claimed she was only watching it because she was too tired to change the movie that Agasa-hakase had left in the DVD player. Smirking, he had told her he didn't believe her. She had thrown a drink coaster at him, but missed.

His snicker must have been loud enough for her to hear as she sat on the floor at the other end of the couch. Though her head didn't move, her piercing eyes slowly shifted sideways to his. At Ai's glare, he raised his eyebrows in faux innocence.

"Be quiet, you guys," Genta protested, despite the fact that no one was talking. "This is the good part."

The group sat in companionable silence until the movie was over. As the credits ran, Mitsuhiko stood up to stretch and received a half-eaten rice ball to the stomach for blocking Genta's view. Ayumi laughed and dropped her two needles as a flustered Mitsuhiko tried to brush the crumbs off his shirt. Being who she was, Ran got away with playfully teasing Genta for wanting to know the name of the actress that had played the movie's heroine.

Conan quickly got up to clear away what remained of the movie snacks before a food fight broke out between the two twelve-year-old boys. Agasa-hakase had cleaned his house only the day before, and Conan had promised the professor that he would make sure the place stayed clean while the latter was away in Kyoto. Ai was already stacking some of the plates on the tea table, so Conan collected the cups instead, making sure to carefully extract the thrown rice ball from the floor as well.

"Oh, here, let me help you with that, Conan-kun," Ran said quickly, starting to rise.

"That's okay, Ran-neechan, we've got it," he replied with a smile. Returning the smile hesitantly, the young woman sat back down and gathered the yarn once more into her lap. Ai ignored them both, and when she stood up with the dishes in her arms, she didn't wait for Conan as she made her way toward the kitchen. Conan hastily scooped up his load and followed, dodging a rowdily thrown pillow as he went.

"So was the movie better the second time?" Conan asked cheekily as he placed the cups next to the dirty dishes on the counter. Ai was already turning on the water to fill up the sink. Not even sparing him a glance, she went on to add the soap, and as the bubbles built up, grabbed the first dish.

"Are you going to make yourself useful or not?" she asked in reply, furiously scrubbing away the sauce. Obediently, Conan grabbed a dry dishtowel, and when Ai had finished rinsing it, took the plate and methodically began to wipe it off. This was a comfortably familiar scene to Conan. Once, he had often helped Ran this way, but he had been spending more and more time at Agasa's lately, so the domestic smell of suds and the dull thump of the plates in the bubbling dishwater had come to associate themselves more as time spent with the strawberry blonde than as past memories.

"You didn't answer my question," Conan complained after the first few dishes. Staring at himself in the dried plate in his hands, he realized that he no longer had to use a stepstool to reach the counter. Neither did Ai, for that matter.

"The movie was exactly the same as it was before," she answered in that tone Conan knew so well. "The movie will never change. Each time it is played, the characters will still say the same words, still carry out the same actions, still make the same mistakes. Replaying events will not alter them. The ending will always be the same."

Conan smiled in amusement. This verbal battlefield was a comfortably familiar scene as well. "If that were true, then no one would ever buy movies. We would see them once, and then move on. What I meant was–"

"You should say what you mean the first time." She handed him another plate, gracing him with the quickest of solemn glances. "You can never change what is said and done."

"Did you learn anything new from seeing the movie a second time?" he persisted. "After all, replaying events in the mind will alter your perception of them. That's how we learn from mistakes."

"…I merely confirmed a fact that I already knew."

"Which was?"

"I prefer a different genre than sentimental stupidity when it comes to entertainment." Noting his grin, she added in annoyance, "And I don't mean the mystery genre, either."

Sobering, Conan finished drying the dish and accepted the damp cup Ai offered him. "It is a rather… sappy movie, I admit. I've seen it enough to know. But it did make me… think, the first time I saw it."

"Oh? What about?" Ai asked, smirking. "How to use the main character's 'wooing techniques' to cause _her _to fall to pieces over you?"

"No!" In irritation, Conan slapped the cup he was holding onto the counter with greater force than necessary. Why was she always serious when he was joking, and always joking when he was being serious? It was so frustrating at times. "It made me think about… the idea of 'soul mates.'"

"Ah," she said, trying to hide the smile on her face by turning her head away from him. He saw her expression anyway.

"So you think it's impossible for two people to be born with a… shared destiny?" he asked ruthlessly.

"Do you?"

"…I think…" He considered his words carefully. "I think that it's not _im_possible. Maybe certain people in the world are meant to be together?" That last wasn't meant to be a question, but it came out that way regardless.

Handing him the next cup, Ai sighed. "Honestly? …It is ridiculous to think that people should be tied together by fate, Kudo-kun," she said, then added dryly, "especially by red string."

"Why?" For some reason, Conan felt let down at her words.

Possibly catching his tone, she continued more softly. "What if two people _were_ tied together somehow, fated for their lives to be intertwined forever? That would mean that a person could not have more than one soul mate. And if one person died, then the remaining partner could only live out the rest of their life alone. More likely, they would die as well."

Feeling Conan's eyes on her, she paused in washing the last cup in her hand and turned her attention to him. "Instead of being destined by birth to live out your life with one other individual, shouldn't a person be able to love different people at different times, so that everyone will have a chance to be loved?"

After a long moment, she turned back to the sink. "We humans should not be tied together by some greater force. It is much better to be free of fate and destiny so that we can decide who we will love."

In thoughtful silence, Conan took the cup that Ai handed him and dried it off. After they had put all of the dishes away in their proper cabinets, they returned together to the living room.

"Conan-kun! Ai-chan!" Ayumi called to them, and motioned for the two to join her around the tea table. Mitsuhiko, Genta, and Ran were all sitting around it as well. In the middle of the tabletop lay a tiny pair of scissors and the ball of red yarn Ayumi had been working with during the movie. Conan remembered when the knitting craze had hit Teitan High School when he was still Shinichi. Both Sonoko and Ran had embraced the craft with enthusiasm, though only Ran had been able to truly master the twin needles. The craze had hit his current school only a few days before, and Ayumi had immediately gone to Ran to beg for her assistance in learning how it worked.

As Conan sat down, he realized that several long pieces of yarn had been cut from the ball and were lying in a pile. Ayumi was carefully knotting one strand to form a loop on both ends. Noticing Conan's scrutiny, Ayumi's cheeks grew red. "I thought that… maybe we could all…"

"Ayumi-chan, you spend too much time around some of those girls at school," Mitsuhiko muttered in exasperation. Sitting down next to Conan, Ai raised an eyebrow in question. Conan shrugged slightly in return.

"She wants to try this game they made up," Genta explained. "Something to do with that movie and all of the 'red thread' stuff."

"You looked pretty eager to try it yourself, Genta-kun," Mitsuhiko teased. Genta swung a fist at him, but the freckled boy had too much practice in ducking his friend's punches to be hit by one he was expecting.

"I'm not totally sure how it works," Ayumi confessed in growing discomfort, "because the girls made it up when they had a sleepover a few weeks ago – it was the same night we all went on the camping trip with Agasa-hakase. Anyway, they watched the movie too and made up this game about figuring out who someone's 'true soul mate' is."

Conan almost sighed aloud. He remembered these types of games. Usually they were written on paper, and involved answering questions, marking off choices, and coming up with an answer as to which people were 'destined' to marry based on what was left. He remembered that Sonoko had been obsessed with these sorts of things when she had been their age. She had always tried to manipulate the papers so that Ran was 'destined' to marry Shinichi. Shinichi had always manipulated the papers so that Sonoko was 'destined' to marry no one.

"They told me about it in class the other day… I mean, they made it like 'friendship soul mates', you know, instead of _romantic_ ones like in the movie… but it could go either way, I guess." Conan wondered if Ayumi's face could grow any redder. "I was just wondering if maybe we could try it, just so I can figure out how it works…"

"We'll try it, Ayumi-chan," Ran said kindly, trying to make the girl feel less embarrassed. "We all know it's just for fun." Ayumi nodded gratefully. Conan doubted very highly that Ayumi would actually take this game lightly. After all, her eyes had darted to himself when she had uttered the word 'romantic.' Conan felt himself twitch. Yes, Ayumi would definitely take the results of this game seriously, especially if they were in her favor. He glanced over at Ai. From the deadpan look on her face, she obviously thought the same.

"So what do we have to do?" Mitsuhiko asked, now looking a little nervous. His eyes hopefully shifted between Ayumi and Ai. Conan pursed his lips to keep from laughing. Genta was also pointedly looking at Ayumi, whereas Ayumi was staring at him and Ran was… also staring at him. Conan blinked. He had been staring at Ai, who was staring blankly off in another direction.

He shook his head slightly. These childish games about love and destiny were just that: childish. There was no reason why he should take this one any more seriously than another.

Breaking the spell that the silence had cast over them, Ayumi laid the piece of yarn in her hand with the others and set the ball of yarn off of the tabletop. "Well, this is how it goes. You take pieces of yarn and tie loops on both ends, so it's like the 'threads of fate' in the movie. Then you mix them all up so you can't tell which loops are connected." She jumbled the pieces of yarn together. "Then, everyone puts one hand near the pile, and we all close our eyes and, in our minds, wish really hard that the threads will reveal our destinies. Then, with our eyes still closed, we search for one loop in the pile and slip it over our pinkie finger. Then, when everyone's ready, we all pull the strings and open our eyes."

"Our soul mates will be revealed!" Genta exclaimed dramatically. Ayumi blushed.

"Genta-kun, it's just a game," Mitsuhiko reminded him.

"So?"

"Let's try it then," Ran said, trying to prevent an argument. Ayumi nodded, then held her hand out over the pile of string.

"Hey…" Genta muttered suspiciously, as the others followed Ayumi's lead, "How can Ran-neechan play? She's too old!" Ran looked surprised, then slightly abashed.

"True love knows no bounds, including age," Mitsuhiko explained with sage-like maturity. Conan and Ai exchanged amused smirks. "And I told you, it's just a game, Genta-kun. …And you need an even number of people to play."

"Now, we all close our eyes…" Ayumi shut her eyes tightly, scrunching her nose up as she concentrated on her wish. Conan glanced around at the others. They had all complied, even Ai, though a frown remained on her face. Conan closed his eyes as well, not 'wishing really hard' to learn his destiny, but thinking about Ai's words in the kitchen. He wondered…

"Okay, when you're done wishing, find a loop…" Ayumi's voice trailed off. Someone's hand smacked into Conan's, jolting his thoughts. Eyes faithfully closed, he felt his way through a rush of fingers and grabbed onto the first piece of yarn he found. He managed to slide the oddly thick loop around his pinkie finger using only his thumb.

After a moment, Ayumi spoke up tentatively. "Is everyone ready?"

Murmurs of assent answered her question. Conan found that his heart was racing. He tried to tell himself again that this was just a childish, silly game that wasn't serious in the least, but his body didn't seem to want to listen. Anxiously, he rubbed his thumb over the thick yarn loop around his pinkie, and then frowned. Something wasn't right here.

"Okay, then," Ayumi said, excitement barely contained in her voice, "On the count of three… One… Two…"

Suddenly, Conan realized what was wrong. "Hey, wait a sec-"

"Three!"

A sharp tug on his little finger caused Conan's eyes to shoot open. There was a moment of silence.

"Hey!" Genta whined in complaint. "My thread isn't connected to anyone's!" He held up his pinkie, from which hung a limp piece of yarn.

"Uh…" Mitsuhiko's cheeks were as red as the thread that connected his pinkie to Ayumi's. The girl looked honestly surprised, though not entirely displeased.

Conan, however, barely noticed the three twelve-year-olds' expressions. He was too busy staring at his own little finger, around which was looped not one, but _two_ pieces of yarn.

His gaze followed one thread until he met Ran's wide eyes. The young woman seemed more taken aback than she should, he thought rather anxiously. It was as if she was taking this seriously. Her eyes held the same longing and suspicion Conan had been faced with all of those times she had convinced herself that he was really Shinichi. It had been a long time since she had looked at him like this, but he remembered the expression well.

Mouth slightly open in unease, Conan forced himself to look away. His gaze followed the second red thread down its length to where it was looped around Ai's delicate little finger. Ai was staring at her finger blankly, but when she lifted her eyes to his, he realized that she was surprised as well. A moment later, however, her frown twitched slightly into an amused smirk.

In puzzled silence, the entire group watched as Ai slowly and gracefully picked up the tiny scissors lying on the table with her other hand and opened the blades wide. With a dramatic snip, the red yarn connecting the two young adults trapped in the bodies of children was severed.

Conan felt as she had just cut through his heart rather than the thread, until her smirk grew into a smile, a true smile directed solely at him.

A glint in her eye, Ai said quietly, "It is much better to be free."


	3. Inertia: Part I

**Fandom: **Detective Conan

**Title: **Inertia: Part I

**Author: **Eeveebeth Fejvu

**Theme: **#19 – Crying all night for you

**Pairing/Characters: **Kudo Shinichi and Miyano Shiho

**Rating: **K+ for imagery, etc.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Detective Conan_. I requested Haibara to make me a pill that would somehow turn me into the creator of the shrunken tantei-san, but my order is in line behind the antidote to Apoptoxin-4869. …So, for now, I write fan fiction. (I do own Haruno-oishasan, though.)

**Summary:** "Kudo-san, I'm afraid I have some bad news."

**Author's Note: **This is Part 1 of 3 of the "Inertia" collection; however, each section mostly stands on its own.

* * *

"Kudo-san, I'm afraid I have some bad news."

Shinichi immediately felt his chest grow cold. The doctor was speaking in _that tone_. He slowly clenched his hands into fists and held them stiffly at his side, attempting to stare down Haruno-oishasan, who stared back at him evenly with the utmost professional detachment. After a long moment, the doctor sighed and adjusted his glasses, choosing to gaze at the dismal medical charts on the clipboard in his hand rather than at the coldly glaring detective.

An abrupt sound from the waiting room behind him caused Shinichi to quickly glance around. His fiancée had stood up from her chair and was gazing at him apprehensively. The worry lines etched across her forehead and her wringing hands said it all. "Shinichi…" The name escaped her mouth with a quiver.

"It's alright, Ran," he quickly responded. She had been about to walk over to him; his reply made her stay put.

"…How about we talk in the hallway, Kudo-san?" the doctor suggested calmly.

As Shinichi turned back for a brief moment at his question, Haruno saw that the detective's eyes were unfocused.

"Ran… I won't be long…" Shinichi made sure that the young woman nodded and sat back down in her chair before he gave the waiting room one last glance.

Sonoko was peering worriedly at Ran out of concern for her friend's anxiety and was gently touching Ran's arm in womanly support. Satou was curled up in Takagi's arms across the room, resting her bandaged head lightly against her boyfriend's shoulder and gently linking her fingers with his, studying his bandaged hands. And the children… Ayumi had buried her tearstained face in her hands; Mitsuhiko was tightly clutching his knees to his chest with a violently pained expression on his face; Genta was looking intensely uncertain and bewildered as he solemnly fingered the hem of his shirt.

The detective, his fists still clenched, trailed Haruno down the white corridor. It took everything in him to repress the furious shudder that threatened to overtake him. The place reminded him of the sterile colorless walls of Agasa's basement laboratory, and of the one who inhabited that lonely, quiet domain… This corridor, however, held all of the hustle and bustle of a normal hospital, with nurses carting IVs and crisscrossing the hallway from one patient's room to the next. Shinichi quickened his pace until he walked alongside the doctor.

Haruno peered at the detective out of the corner of his eye, always professional. "I see that your wounds have been attended to, Kudo-san?"

Kudo-san shot Haruno a look that rattled his nerves. Absentmindedly, the detective's right hand went to the pad of gauze that had been secured over the ugly fresh abrasion on his forehead, though this was not the only place he had been bandaged, according to the nurse's report. There had been other bruises, cuts, and scrapes, but they were all hidden safely under the detective's dark blue suit.

The doctor continued calmly, "I believe you've already received painkillers, correct? However, if they begin to wear off and you start to feel uncomfortable, please inform the-"

"Tell me!" The detective interrupted him in a hissed undertone.

The doctor raised his eyebrows slightly. "Why don't we wait to talk until we get to-"

"Now." The detective's eyes shifted to the white linoleum floor. After a long moment, the doctor turned his own eyes back to the medical charts in his hand. He sighed. Dealing with the distraught family members of critically injured patients had always been the worst part of his job. But this detective, the great Kudo Shinichi that he had read about in newspapers for several years now, was not even a relative of the patient. As far as he knew, Kudo was only a co-worker and a neighbor. How else could they be related, when Kudo had no siblings and was engaged to the woman he had left behind in the waiting room?

The doctor and the detective had taken several more steps down the bustling hallway before Haruno actually said, "Would you prefer the good news or the bad news first?"

The age-old question seemed to only infuriate Kudo more, though Haruno had thought he would be glad to hear there was anything that could be called "good" news. The doctor continued, "The good news is, she is still alive at this time."

A great deal of the wrath in Kudo's expression evaporated at his words and was replaced by relief. However, the darkness descended back onto his face as Haruno quickly added, "But, the bad news is, she is only alive _at this time._"

The detective stopped in the middle of the hallway, forcing the doctor to pause, and stared at him with a look that Haruno couldn't read. "What do you mean?" The words came out differently than the doctor had expected: Kudo had spoken in a hoarse, panicked whisper.

"I mean that…" Haruno braced himself. "…I don't expect… She does not have very long to live, Kudo-san. Not with the injuries she's sustained." Though the hallway was still filled with the miscellaneous noises of a hospital, all Shinichi could hear was silence and the doctor's words echoing in his head. Seeing that Kudo was unresponsive, Haruno appended, "There is always a chance that she will pull through… I've seen cases similar to hers where the victim ends up living comfortably for several more years… but I've never seen anything this… bad that… Frankly, Kudo-san, I'm surprised that she even made it to the hospital without going into cardiac arrest. She must be a strong woman to-"

"She is." Kudo was looking at the ground again. Suddenly, a single raw laugh escaped his lips. "No… no, she isn't." He seemed to reconsider once more. "…Yes… yes, she is strong." The detective's intense blue eyes were suddenly penetrating the doctor's. "And she's going to live."

The doctor felt a surge of pity. The colleagues of critically injured officers that he had been forced to talk with before were usually more realistic than Kudo. Perhaps the detective had never lost a coworker in his department before. "Kudo-san, I can tell you believe in her strength," Haruno spoke, hoping he sounded consoling (it wasn't his forte), "but do you know the extent of her injuries?" No, of course he didn't. Haruno had not told him yet. "Come with me."

Haruno then continued to lead Kudo down the hospital hallway. A long period of discomforting silence passed between the two men, one a fifty-three year old veteran physician, the other a twenty-one year old hotshot investigator for Tokyo's Beika district police department. Finally, after turning off onto a short, oddly silent corridor, they arrived at their destination. Haruno paused with his hand on the door handle, feeling the detective's blazing eyes on his back. With a sigh, the doctor cracked the door open the slightest bit and poked his head inside.

Shinichi wanted nothing more than to slam past Haruno-oishasan and charge into the room. But the doctor was still holding the medical charts, _her_ medical charts, and suddenly Shinichi realized that he needed to know what he was about to see before he actually saw it. If only – and had it really been just seven hours ago? – if only he had known what he, and her, and Satou, and Takagi, were about to face… What then?

Haruno withdrew his head from the room and quietly pulled the door closed once more. He turned around and stared at the detective. Kudo was still clearly angry, but he looked more introverted than before. Their eyes connected. Haruno adjusted his spectacles in a professional manner. "Her foster father, Agasa Hiroshi-hakase, informed me that you, Kudo-san, would be extraordinarily anxious to know about her condition. Agasa-hakase is with her right now. …Not that she's awake presently; she is unconscious at the moment, but… I usually don't release the conditions of a patient this soon except to family members or spouses."

Shinichi understood the searching look that the doctor was giving him. "She's… I… we…." How could he ever explain his relationship with her when he had never fully figured it out himself? "I'm… her friend…" How weak, how lame that sounded. "I… We've been through a lot together, before…" Even that did not cover it. Nevertheless, Haruno nodded slowly. Agasa-hakase, Shinichi thought, must have said something incredible to get this man to talk to me.

"Do you really want to know the extent of her injuries?"

Shinichi did not say anything for a long moment. Finally, "Yes." What was the point in waiting anyway, when, in the meantime, she might… no, she wouldn't… not now…

Haruno adjusted his glasses once more and peered down coolly at those blasted medical charts he had kept so securely in his hand. "I'll explain this in the least technical way possible, Kudo-san. Let's see… First of all, there is the severe strain that was put on her neck by… what was it…?"

"Rope." The detective clenched his hands even tighter into fists.

Another surge of pity came over the doctor. He had overlooked the fact that Kudo-san had been there when the woman had been… With more sincere sympathy, Haruno continued, "Yes, that's what I was told. The trauma that was caused by the tightening around her neck is actually only moderate, but I believe that some permanent damage has occurred to her recurrent laryngeal nerve. This is what carries voice signals to the different voice box muscles that are responsible for such actions as breathing or vibration for voice use. Therefore, it is most likely that she is going to experience some form of vocal cord paralysis. We're not going to know the extent of the damage unless we… until we do a laryngeal electromyography, but anything from noisy breathing to swallowing problems could become a lasting symptom."

Kudo-san was staring at the back of the charts fixedly, his eyebrows furrowed in an effort to absorb the doctor's words. Haruno hoped that the detective did not believe the vocal cord paralysis to be the worst of the damage; he was just getting started.

With a quick scan of the medical charts, the doctor continued, "While checking out her basic condition when she first arrived, I noticed that there was extensive damage done to the cochlea in both of her ears. …She is suffering from inner ear trauma, which I believe was caused by a singular, intense exposure to an elevated level of sound. I heard there was… an explosion…?"

Kudo did not seem to recognize that he was being asked a question at first. Finally, he blinked and numbly mumbled, "Yes."

"Is it possible that the victim was nearby when the explosion occurred?"

There was another long pause before Kudo answered, in the same dazed tone, "Yes."

"Experiencing a certain high range of decibels, even for such a short incident as an explosion, could have lasting effects on her auditory range. …She is most likely going to have some level of hearing impairment, which we will only be able to check for if… when she regains consciousness."

Kudo was now staring at Haruno-oishasan with a deadened expression on his face. Haruno continued to trudge through the list of injuries. "Also, during a secondary test of her condition, it was discovered that her eyes were exposed to… some solution containing a high concentration of sodium hydroxide. I don't know if you have any knowledge of sodium hydroxide, which is more commonly known as-"

"Lye." Haruno blinked at the detective's whisper and adjusted his glasses professionally. Kudo began to recite, "It's also called caustic soda, because it is a caustic metallic base. It's used as a catalyst for the transesterification of methanol and triglycerides in the manufacture of biodiesel, as drain cleaners, and as other things. It… can cause heat burns or chemical burns when… exposed to skin or…"

_Well_, Haruno-oishasan thought. The hotshot did know his stuff after all; no wonder he was so famous, and no wonder the police took him on board at such a tender age. The doctor's surprise faded away into pity once more as the detective slowly looked up at him and added, "She taught me all of that."

Haruno-oishasan didn't know what to say to this, so he turned his eyes back to the charts. "It appears that she tried to rinse the sodium hydroxide out of her eyes with water at some point, which is the best possible thing that she could have done-"

"She would know to do that. She's worked with chemicals more dangerous than that before."

"-but it is still probably… not enough. …Her eyes are undeniably going to be scarred. Sodium hydroxide burns eye tissue so easily. She is going to experience at least mild to moderate vision loss."

There was a long tense pause. Kudo continued to stare at Haruno. The doctor no longer saw any of the intense anger that had been there before. The detective seemed to have surrendered to his desolation. Suddenly, his mouth opened slightly and remained that way, like a baffled gaping fish. Then, surprising the doctor, he cried out hoarsely, "Why…? How…? Can't you do… anything to…"

"I'm not finished yet, Kudo-san." The doctor's terse statement made Shinichi's chest grow cold once more.

"…But… What else could there possibly…?"

"I told you, Kudo-san; her injuries are multiple and grievous. …And I'm afraid… that this last bit… might…"

"…What is it?"

"…You are aware of the gunshot wounds she received to her lower back?"

Immediately, the livid fire in Kudo's eyes lit up once more; his slackened hands tightened again into rigid fists. "Yes," he growled darkly, "I am."

Haruno almost left right then. Let Agasa Hiroshi-hakase tell this angry hotshot detective, "friend" of the patient, the worst bit of the news. But Haruno was a professional; he would not give in to his apprehension of this young man's wrath, no matter how much he simply wanted to thrust the medical charts into Kudo's hands and quickly retire to his office for a comforting cup of tea.

"…Several of the bullets have penetrated… the lumbar and sacral levels of her… spinal cord. …Anything higher, in the thoracic level or the cervical level, and she would easily lose all control of her hands, arms, or worse, her diaphram, in which case she'd need a ventilator just to breathe. But, as the gunshot wounds are to the lumbar and sacral levels, loss of control should only occur to her body… below the waist: hips, legs, anus, ankles, toes…"

"What are you trying to say?!"

"…She has parapalegia, Kudo-san. Full paralysis of everything from the waist down."

There was complete silence.

Once again, the anger in the detective's eyes melted away. It was replaced by quiet dispair.

"…Paralysis?"

The doctor nodded. "Yes. Paraplegia, vision loss, hearing loss, vocal cord trauma. Not to mention the extreme blood loss from the bullet wounds. Luckily, we had enough blood of her type in stock to complete a transfusion, but… Can't you understand, Kudo-san, why I told you… she does not have very long to live? So many of her sensory functions have been significantly weakened or lost completely that… Even if she wakes up soon, you see how hard it would be for her to come back from all of this? She'll need a lot of surgery for her various injuries, she'll need rigorous rehabilitation after that, and she'll need constant attention and care for the rest of her life. Depending on how advanced her sensory injuries turn out to be, she may have a difficult time just communicating with anyone. Even if she remains optomistic about this whole ordeal, I just can't see-"

Kudo suddenly gave a strangled sob. "She's not… She's not optimistic… She's the most pessimistic person I've ever met… Do you know… She's tried to kill herself before, several times? …It's been… at least two, maybe three years since she last tried, and she's stronger than that now, but… Do you know why?! Do you?!" Haruno stared at him, at an utter loss. "Because she thought it would help! She thought that, if she was dead, the people around her – the people she cared about – would be better off! She's tried to kill herself to… protect others before… including me…"

Haruno continued to stare, then adjusted his glasses. "Honestly," he spoke softly, "I'm afraid that, should she awaken soon or not, she will not live through the night, Kudo-san. I've informed you of her condition, according to Agasa-hakase's request, and now-"

The doctor hurriedly stepped to the side as the door to the patient's room abruptly creaked open. Agasa slowly stepped out of the room, the door shutting behind him with an almost imperceptible click. He was staring down at the floor at first, but after a long moment of breathless silence, he looked up at Shinichi. The detective had never seen hakase look so sad and heartbroken in his life; there were dried lines of tears down his cheeks, and the eyes behind the glasses were moist with the tears that had yet to fall.

Slowly, Agasa-hakase turned to look at Haruno. "She's still asleep," he whispered unevenly, "…She looks… peaceful enough at the moment…"

"Has there been any change in the monitors…?"

"No… no…" Agasa shook his head, rubbing his left eye behind his glasses. "…Her heart rate is steady, and… almost normal…"

"Are you finished for now, Agasa-hakase?"

Agasa sighed a shaky breath. "Yes… I've… I'll go wait in the waiting room right now… But… But if anything-"

"Of course, Agasa-hakase," the doctor gave a small formal bow, "I will inform you immediately. I assume you know your way back…?"

"Yes, I do." Suddenly, Shinichi felt a large warm hand on his shoulder. Once more, his eyes connected with hakase's. In a low whisper, so Haruno-oishasan could not hear, Agasa whispered, "Don't… let this get you down, Shinichi-kun… You did what you knew was right, just like you've always done… This was all just an accident… She'll… She'll pull through… She knows how much we all care about her… She's a strong girl… She won't…"

"I know," Shinichi managed to whisper before his voice gave out on him.

Agasa-hakase patted him several times on the shoulder. Shinichi guessed it was more for the professor's comfort than his own. "I know you know," Agasa whispered, "…Now, go on in. She'll… want to see you, you know…"

Agasa seemed not to have given it thought that she was still unconscious, but all Shinichi muttered back was, "She'll probably hate me for… seeing her with her hair messy or something…" A dry laugh escaped his lips.

The smallest hint of a smile graced Agasa's face. "Go on in. I'll… go sit with Ran-chan, if you want me to." Shinichi gave a brief nod. Then, Agasa-hakase patted Shinichi's shoulder once more, turned away from the detective and the doctor, and slowly padded down the silent corridor.

Haruno waited until Agasa-hakase was out of sight before asking, "Kudo-san…?" The detective gave the doctor a cold glance. Haruno simply held the door to the patient's room open for him. "I'll give you as long as you need, but should any of the monitors begin to-"

"Yes… I know… I won't be long…" _I promised Ran_, Shinichi thought, _that I would come back soon_

Haruno nodded, gave a small bow to Kudo, and, after the detective had softly stepped into the room, quietly shut the door behind him. Dealing with the distraught hotshot had worn him out, maybe even worse than actually seeing all of the afflictions the young woman had somehow managed to accumulate. Haruno sighed. Perhaps he had time to go to his office and make himself that quick cup of tea…?

After the door clicked shut behind him, Shinichi stood in silence in the dimly-lit room for an everlasting moment. There she was, laid out under the crisp white sheets of the hospital bed like a rag doll. Her short strawberry blonde hair – which looked redder than usual under the strange hospital lighting – lay fanned out across the white pillow, her hands lying limply at her sides. There was an IV and a simple chair sitting next to the bed, and at least five monitors surrounded her on all sides, beeping gently as they traced her heart rate and other vital signs. She was covered in bandages and gauze, for the various scrapes and bruises that all of them had suffered.

Chillingly, he could see the dark bluish-purple imprint that the noose had made around her neck, and though he had seen such a mark on many a corpse before, he almost gagged as a phantom sensation swept across his throat. Her eyes had been wrapped in white bandages, and Shinichi stared at her immobile face.

He stepped forward, closer to her bed. He had not forgotten the doctor's blather about the sodium hydroxide, but it was not right for them to have her eyes bound so. If she awoke, how would she know she was awake if she couldn't open her eyes? Perhaps she had been awake already and had fallen back into slumber because she could only see darkness.

When he got to the bed, he ignored the chair and gently hefted himself up to sit on the edge of the mattress to her right. His hand reached out without hesitation, but paused just before his fingers could skim the bandage. The muddled, jumbled thoughts in his head were distracting him; he fought them away just long enough to gently take the white material between his forefinger and thumb and pull it up to her forehead, revealing her closed eyelids. Luckily, the bandages had not been extraordinarily tight, and when he laid his hand back on his lap, the cloth remained lying loosely on her forehead.

For a long moment, he just stared at her face.

Suddenly, he found himself talking.

"Miyano-san…? …Shiho-san… I… I…"

He started to choke, but swallowed it and continued, turning his eyes to face the beeping monitors.

"I didn't know… that… they would recognize you… as Sherry… not after all this time. …But I should have known better, huh? …You were right, like always… You knew… that some of _them_ were still out there… looking for revenge… looking for you… But I… I didn't listen…did I?"

He paused for a long moment, then glanced at her eyelids. They were closed in an unalterable sort of way. He felt a shudder pass over him.

"I… I… I'm s-s… I…" He blinked, his vision blurring with the water accumulating around his eyes. Suddenly, he sucked in a breath and tried to talk without his voice quivering.

"Mitsuhiko-kun called me this morning. He wanted me to ask you at work today if you would help him on the sixth grade science fair project they're starting next week. I didn't think about it until just now. I asked him why he wouldn't just call Hakase's house and ask you himself, but he didn't seem to be able to come up with a logical reply, so I said I would, to keep him from hyperventilating or something. Not that he really needs help, you know, but… you know why. Huh… even though all three of them have known about us for years now, they've never really stopped thinking of us as Conan-kun and Haibara-san, have they…? Especially Mitsuhiko-kun..."

Shinichi felt a dry laugh escape his throat. "…It's funny… Being around them, I often find myself being Edogawa Conan all over again… and I'll wonder… if I made the right choice… In the end, though, I know that I did, but…You know… I've never been sure… Why… did you return to being Miyano Shiho? …Haibara Ai had a perfectly good home and many friends and… Even though I know you still live at Hakase's, and you still talk to the children… Why? You don't go out with the other lab techs after work, you're not dating anyone, and… It's not that I'm not glad that you work in forensics, so that if I need help on a case you're right there, but…"

It was almost easier to talk to her now and say exactly what was on his mind, knowing that she wouldn't cut him off with some biting remark or sarcastic observation of his 'obviously deteriorating intellect'.

Except…

He missed those biting remarks and sarcastic observations.

"You know… we haven't really been talking much lately, have we, Shiho-san? …Ever since… Ran and I got engaged, but… I know that you don't resent her for being so like your sister… and yet… I feel like… maybe… We just don't talk like we used to. …I know we talked a lot more before you completed the antidote, but even after that, we still went out to lunch sometimes when days at the department were too slow, and we still went on camping trips with Hakase and the kids, but… Lately, all it has been is a quick hello in the hallway as you head off to the forensics lab and I head off to the main offices… I really hate that. …And… I miss…"

Suddenly, his voice cracked. "…You know, hakase was in here just now… He's really worried about you… We all are… Ayumi-chan, Mitsuhiko-kun, and Genta-kun are all in the waiting room… Their parents brought them as soon as they heard… They've been there for several hours now… Satou-san and Takagi-san are there, too… They've already been bandaged up… Satou had the worst, but it was only a slight head wound, no permenant damage… And… Ran's waiting, too, you know… Suzuki-san's there with her, to keep her company… Ran got here only a few minutes after we did… She cares about you, you know, Shiho-san? Ran really cares about you… You're like… You're like a… You're really important to her… I mean, with that antidote, you gave me back to her, so… I…"

His hands were trembling violently now. He trailed his shaking fingers through his hair. He knew he was rambling, but the words would not stop pouring out of his mouth in a flood of confusion and uncertainty. Her eyelids had not flickered, not even once.

He needed to leave. He had told Ran that he would come back soon.

But he didn't feel like leaving just yet.

He didn't want to leave her unconscious in this room all by herself, or maybe worse, with Haruno once the doctor returned. In his opinion, Haruno-oishasan cared more about being right in his diagnoses than about helping people wth their injuries. "Shiho-san… wake up… please… You have to wake up… You have to… The doctor… he thinks that… you're injured too badly to wake up, but… you aren't… you can't be… Shiho-san… Please… wake up… Wake up…"

Suddenly, the heart rate monitor skipped a beat.

Shinichi froze, his chest growing colder than it ever had before.

The beeping returned to its regular, monotonous pattern.

Fat, hot tears began to streaming down his cheeks.

His hands grasped at the bedsheet. "Shiho, you have to wake up! You have to wake up now! You can't die! Don't you understand?! We all care about you so much! What would the children do without you?! You're one of their best friends, their Shiho-neechan. And Agasa-hakase! Do you have any idea how much he loves you?! You're his daughter, the closest thing to a true family he's ever had! And… and…

"What about me, Shiho? I care about you. I know… I have Ran to talk to, but I can't really talk to her about my cases without her getting frustrated… and I know I have Hattori-kun to talk to about those things, but he lives all the way in Osaka, so I don't see him just every day… You're my best friend, Shiho. You really are. When I first met you, I never imagined it, but… You understand me better than anyone else I've ever met… And after we took the Organization down, I thought that… you had been set free… to live a normal life without the constant fear of _them_ overtaking you… I… You can't die, Shiho, you just can't… You have to wake up… You have to… There's no reason why you shouldn't be awake now… You… can't… die… Shiho…"

His hands had released the bedsheet during his plea, and he found himself leaning over her body, the back of his fingers gently rubbing up and down her soft cheek – something he'd never even done to Ran. His eyesight was blurred, and heavy tears hung on the tip of his nose and chin.

"You can't… leave us to be with Akemi-san yet, Shiho… We all still need you… _I_ still need you… Shiho…"

Suddenly, Shinichi felt the faintest twitch of her cheek against his fingers. His heart leaped, and he checked her eyelids for movement. They were flickering, very softly, almost unnoticable unless he was looking for it. His fingers paused their gentle rubbing, then twisted around so that he could cup the left side of her face in his hand.

"…Shiho?"

Her closed lips suddenly opened the slightest bit, as if she was about to speak, though no sound came out.

"Shiho, wake up! Please! It's Shinichi! You have to wake up! …Shiho!"

Abruptly, her eyes opened.

In horrified shock, he flinched, and his hand almost drew away from her face. So the doctor's words about sodium hydroxide had been true. Her eyes had been scarred in the most terrible way. Despite the hundreds of gruesome murder scenes he had attended, nothing had prepared him to see his best friend's blue-green eyes with… such damage that he couldn't even describe.

She inhaled deeply through her mouth, but when she did, it was raspy and strained. Her body flinched violently, and instinctively, her hands flew up from her sides to reach for her neck, needing desperately to tear away whatever it was that was impeding her breathing. In the process, her fingers skimmed Shinichi's suit jacket, and suddenly, her fear had found another unknown enemy to be alarmed about.

Shinichi almost stumbled off the bed as her arm flailed out against him, her hand striking his face. He wondered, for a split second, if she had done it out of anger because he had been sitting there with his hand on her cheek – she wasn't always very receptive to touch – but then he realized that it was far worse than that. She simply didn't know that it was him.

She was squinting directly at him with those horribly scarred eyes, but it was like she couldn't see him; she knew something was there, but what that something was, she didn't know. In a quick movement, born from the defensive instict she had developed as a fugitive from the Organization, she got herself halfway propped up by her left arm, the bandages he had brushed to her forehead falling around her neck like a cloth necklace as her right hand swung back again to strike at the unknown enemy once more.

This time, Shinichi was ready. He moved his head aside as her hand came flying past his face and neatly grabbed her wrist, holding it securely. "Shiho! It's me! Shinichi!" he hissed in a whisper.

Regardless of his imploring, she cried out a strange animalistic noise in surprise and began to violently try to jerk her arm out of his grasp. Shinichi held onto her wrist doggedly. "Shiho! Listen, it's me!" She paid no attention to his words, continuing to struggle. Finally, in a mixture of panic and desperation, he yelled loudly, "SHIHO!"

Suddenly, she stopped. Her squinting eyes widened, giving him a better and unwanted view of the scarring. Her arm relaxed. Then, the wheazy voice that came from her mouth rasped, "…Kudo-kun?"

"YES, IT'S ME!" he shouted. She was staring at him, but her mouth was open in confusion.

"Why… talking so… quietly…" She rasped. No, Shinichi thought, the doctor said… her ears… the explosion. Suddenly, a terrified look shot across her face, and she began to try to jerk away from him. "No…! No…!"

"IT'S ME! IT'S SHINICHI! It's… it's not the voice emulator… I promise…" He wasn't sure if she heard his last words or not, but she paused in her flailing once more and squinted at him dubiously. After a long moment, she gave a slight jerk of her arm, and Shinichi released her wrist cautiously. She started to draw her arm back to her side, but stopped, then slowly reached out towards him. Shinichi held his breath as her soft fingertips came to rest on the side of his cheek. Her fingers did not stay on his cheek, however, but began to wander over his eyes, his nose, his lips… All the while, she stared at him with those scarred, blurred eyes.

"Kudo-kun…" she whispered. With her fingers still on his face, he nodded. "What's… What's…" Without warning, the arm that was propping her halfway up shifted as she tried to brace herself in a full sitting position. With horrified detachment, Shinichi watched as her body jerked slightly to the side in a command to her legs to bend at the knees and slide up under herself so that she could sit up straight. Her legs did not respond to the command. A raspy gasp escaped her lips as she almost fell back onto her pillow, one of her hands catching onto Shinichi's jacket's collar desperately.

Shinichi's arms instantly went to grab her, pulling her up towards him. Her legs, like plastic appendeges on some child's grotesque play costume, moved of their own accord, sliding heavily towards the opposite side of the bed. She gasped hard, as if someone had struck her in the back with something heavy, and Shinichi thought, the gunshot wounds… her spinal cord…

Her arms went around his neck in panic, and he held her tightly to his chest, feeling his nose pressing into her hair and her ragged, disjointed breath on his skin. For a long moment, they stayed still. The tips of her strawberry blonde hair tickled his nose, but he did not brush it away; he held her closer.

Then, with a start, he realized she was trembling. "Shiho?" he asked, his voice directly in her ear.

She abruptly pulled away from him, and her body clumsily fell back to the matress, despite her stubborn attempts to keep herself upright. She stuggled, desperately trying to right herself and slide her legs back to their former position. Shinichi stared, frozen and not knowing what to do. His ears were filled with the sound of her pained hisses and gasps; she was dragging those highly sensitized gunshot wounds across the mattress.

"Shiho, you have to stop moving," Shinichi barely managed to get the words out – who knew if she heard them? – and raised his hand to place it on her shoulder in a calming gesture. She was already ceasing her movements, however, and with one last gasp, her head hit the pillow.

Once again, he froze, his hand in the air, watching her breathe. She was gulping in as much air as her bruised throat could manage, and her fingers closed tightly on the bedsheets at her side. Her wide scarred eyes stared up at him. Finally, the raspy voice escaped her lips once more. "…What's… happened to me…?"

Kudo Shinichi broke down crying.

This was not how it was supposed to be. She was not supposed to be this way. At one time, she had been this afraid and confused and in pain, never knowing whether or not there was a black Porsche parked just around the next street corner, but that time was not now. She was supposed to be free of gunshot wounds, free of uncertainty, free of terror. Lying there, gasping for breath and wide-eyed in confusion… it was pathetic. She looked so pathetic right now. What had happened to the great Miyano Shiho: genius toxicologist, queen of all things sarcastic and witty, endurer of a blackened past?

His fists were clenched in rage as the scalding tears streaked down his cheeks in a flood. He was so angry, so full of wrath. Not at her. Not at the doctor.

If only… If only… he had known what he, and her, and Satou, and Takagi, were about to face… What then?

Could this all have been prevented?

Sitting there on the edge of the bed, convulsing in his wretched sobs, he did not notice her staring at him with a look of disbelief on her face. It was disorienting enough to awaken to such a strange, restraining dream as this – why couldn't she see anything, hear anything clearly, and what was choking her, and why couldn't she move her legs? – but now, why was Kudo-kun crying this way?

One of his clenched fists was resting on the mattress, not far from her right hand. She knew it was there, without seeing it, so she moved her hand to rest it gently on his. It had been her objective to get his attention, but she suddenly found herself unable to speak. Pure adrenaline had kept it away before, but now, Pain had wrapped its wickedly grasping tendrils around her abdomen – such a strange contrast to the nothingness that she felt below her waist – and was sending the most horrendous pulses up her back. Her eyes had started to throb and burn as well, and she wanted to scratch at them and pull the cotton out of her ears.

Her mind plunged into a sort of sickening vertigo. She knew she was about to go unconscious; she felt the tugging at the depths of her mind. She had been drugged to sleep before, but this was worse; there was nothing to physically fight against. She felt her agonized eyes begin to roll upwards, so she closed her eyelids. She breathed in one last raspy breath.

The last thing she felt before she was pulled under was the drop of a hot tear on the back of her hand.


	4. Inertia: Part II

**Fandom: **Detective Conan

**Title: **Inertia: Part II

**Author: **Eeveebeth Fejvu

**Theme: **#02 – I'm willing to sacrifice anything just for you

**Pairing/Characters: **Kudo Shinichi and Miyano Shiho

**Rating: **K

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Detective Conan_. I requested Haibara to make me a pill that would somehow turn me into the creator of the shrunken tantei-san, but my order is in line behind the antidote to Apoptoxin-4869. …So, for now, I write fan fiction. (I do own Nara Maeko, though.)

**Summary:** "…Kudo's never been the same since…"

**Author's Note: **This is Part 2 of 3 of the "Inertia" collection; however, each section mostly stands on its own.

* * *

Nara Maeko had been a fidgety sort of person ever since she was small, and now it was extraordinarily difficult to keep still as she stood in the doorway of the Beika District Police Department, nervously awaiting some sort of greeting or first instructions. To top it all off, her dark blue uniform – brand new and unwashed as of yet – was starting to itch and she was dying to scratch in rather impolite places.

She stayed put, however, and waited uncomfortably until one of the officers – a woman with very short brown hair and a thin scar on her forehead – finally spotted her looking out of place and invited her into the room.

"First day, huh?" the officer asked her with a knowing grin. "I thought our new recruit wasn't coming in until next week. Oh, well. …Anyway, welcome to Beika. We're a pretty close-knit family here, but we always welcome new blood. …What's your name?"

With a start, she realized she had forgotten her badge at her apartment – she had been in such a rush to get here on time in hopes of making a good impression, only to stand around and stare for ten minutes before anyone noticed her existence. "Oh! I'm Nara Maeko, transfer from Osaka, uh… Takagi-san." She gave a quick bow, her ponytail swinging about her face.

The officer laughed and Nara froze in confusion, wondering what she had done wrong. "No, no, don't worry, Nara-san; it's nothing. Just don't believe what my badge says. My name is Satou Miwako." Satou grinned. "If you ask for Takagi-san around the office, you'll be asking for my husband. We both work here, so I use my maiden name for professional purposes… not to mention everyone here has always called me Satou." Nara nodded quickly.

For the next twenty minutes, Satou showed her around the building and introduced her to her new fellow officers. First off was Chiba, who came in with an abundance of donuts for everyone (allowing Nara to acquire the other thing she had forgotten that morning – breakfast). Then she met Shiratori, whose somber disposition made him somehow rather intimidating, and Megure, who was surprised to learn that the transfer had come in early but nevertheless seemed to be a pleasant sort of superior. Nara washappy to meet Satou's husband (Takagi-san turned out to be quite cute, really; rather too bad he _was_ married) and she immediately felt a kinship with Yumi (within three minutes, Nara had already happily agreed to meet up with her and her friends at the local karaoke box that night). After that, however, her mind was so full with new names and faces to remember that the various other officers seemed to mix together. Nara sighed. It would take time, after all, to get situated here, and this was only her first day.

Once she and Satou had made their way back towards the front of the offices, she found herself peering about the desks curiously. Satou obviously could tell something was up, as she asked, "Anything wrong, Nara-san?"

"Hm? Oh, nothing! I was just…" she trailed off. Seeing Satou's raised eyebrow, she added, "It's just that… well, I'd heard that… someone else worked here in Beika as well… I'm probably just being silly…"

Satou blinked for a moment, then a knowing grin appeared on her face. "You're from Osaka, right? So you know Hattori Heiji-tantei?" Nara nodded, her cheeks growing warm. "Since you know the Detective of the West, I'm guessing, then, that you're looking for a certain Detective of the East, known as Kudo Shinichi?"

Nara felt her blush grow deeper. "Well, it's just that, I've worked under Hattori Heizo-keibu for awhile, so I've gotten to see Hattori Heiji-tantei at crime scenes before. …His skill in deduction is very impressive to watch, really." Of course, Hattori Heiji _himself_ had been impressive to watch as well, but he was married to a lovely woman named Kazuha. "And I've heard that Kudo Shinichi is just as impressive, maybe even more. Hattori Heiji-tantei was always talking about Kudo-tantei and how good a detective he is, so… I'd kind of like to meet him."

Satou smiled. "Certainly you can meet him. Only…" She looked around at all of the desks. "…Hm… I guess he hasn't come in yet…" Nara felt her eyebrows rise. Satou didn't seem too surprised or troubled by the fact that Beika's most famous detective had not yet shown up for work.

"He probably stumbled across some poor impaled body or something a few blocks away," Chiba threw in as he walked past, donut in hand. "On average, he usually stumbles across at least two bodies a week on his way to work." Seeing Nara's horrified wide eyes, he laughed, and, apparently not understanding the source of her astonishment, added, "Yep, Takagi-kun and I keep a running tally. The average is about two and three sevenths bodies, but we figured that we'd rather not think about three sevenths of a body, so we just call it two."

"Chiba-kun!" Satou waved him away irritably, and Chiba wandered off, grinning. Turning back to Nara, she continued, "It really isn't uncommon for dead bodies to turn up with Kudo around, but I suppose that happened with Hattori-tantei as well?" Nara nodded. Satou sighed. "It's a disturbing phenomenon, but it does keep the department busy with cases." Suddenly, Satou looked puzzled.

"…What's wrong?"

"It's just that… Kudo-san probably would have called us by now if he were on a case… It's not as if he needs us to help him solve it; it's just regulation formalities, but…" Satou raised her voice and shouted across the office. "Hey! Has anyone gotten a call from Kudo yet?" There was no affirmative reply.

"Could something bad have happened to him?" Nara asked, concerned.

"Well… if it's not a case, he might be having some… troubles at home…" Satou suddenly looked a bit uncomfortable.

"What… kind of troubles? …I mean, if I'm prodding where I shouldn't, just say and I'll-"

"No, no, it's alright…" Satou sighed, and Nara watched the woman's eyes turn towards Takagi across the room. "It's just that… There was this case a few years ago…" Satou unconsciously ran her fingers along the thin scar on her forehead, remembering. "It's probably been about, oh, I don't know… about four years ago now… It was before Takagi and I were married… Well… four of us were out on this raid and… it turned out… _bad_; the people we had been tracking injured our top lab technician in the most… horrible way… and she… You have no idea how horrible it was…"

Sighing, Satou continued, "It was… such a tragedy… Kudo's never been the same since… He used to be… a lot, well, happier… He's always been intense about his cases, but now… He's so serious and solemn all of the time, even though he often tries to mask his feelings… He always seems to deal with criminals in a rougher manner than he used to… I think he feels he was responsible for what happened – everything he's done since has only proved it – but nothing anyone could ever say will convince him otherwise…"

Nara felt a wave of unhappiness pass over her. "Well… maybe he needs something to take his mind off of it. …Doesn't he have a girlfriend or something?"

A halfhearted grin – it was actually more of a grimace – came to Satou's face. "He has a wife…"

"Oh! …Is that why you think… he might be having troubles at home-" Before Nara could say anything else, the door to the offices burst open, causing both her and Satou to start at the bang. A tall young man in a dark blue suit strode quickly into the room, and Nara only had a second to glimpse the deep frown on his face before he stalked past her. Tucked under his arm were several bulky manila folders, which trailed papers that drifted to the floor like white feathers.

"Kudo-san, where have you been?" Megure called out in a surprisingly welcoming tone for one whose subordinant just came in drastically late. Nara blinked.

"Man found murdered on the corner near Haido Park," Kudo replied sternly in greeting, slamming the folders down on Megure's desk. "…Shot… three times... Four witnesses, all of them suspects. A few guards from a bank nearby are keeping the suspects contained for me. I found a strange substance in a bag hidden in the bushes nearby. I came in to see if anyone wants to come with me." Chiba and Takagi both stood up. Kudo gave them a curt nod. "I'm going back out to question the suspects; then I'm going to get the substance tested."

"Alright," Megure said in a tone that clearly meant he had given up his control over the detective. His focus wandered to the folder on his desk, and the papers that had settled on the floor. "Are these the files from the Kira case-?"

"Yes." As Kudo turned around towards the door, Nara glimpsed his blue eyes. They seemed so dark and unfocused, as if he was off in his own world. Nara wondered if he was in the sort of detective mode she had seen Hattori Heiji-tantei in before; yet it seemed like more than this case was weighing on his mind.

Satou shifted a bit where she stood, and Nara gave the woman a puzzled look. She was frowning. Kudo had his hand on the doorknob before Satou finally spoke. "Where was the man shot, Kudo-san?" The detective paused, his back to the room. Chiba and Takagi, who had started to follow him, paused as well. Nara's eyes shifted to the hand Kudo had placed on the doorknob, checking for a wedding band around his ring finger. She caught sight of a plain gold one.

Kudo did not turn around, but his quiet reply was easily heard throughout the suddenly silent office. "…In… the lower back…"

With that, Kudo yanked the door open and was gone. Quickly, Takagi and Chiba trailed after the detective, the latter telling Nara, "I told you how he stumbles across bodies; this is his third this week," as he hurried past. After the two had closed the door behind them, the room remained silent for a beat before the officers all returned to their previous business.

Satou glanced down at the papers on the floor and sighed again. "I thought… that might be it…" Seeing Nara's glance, she whispered, "_She_ was shot in the lower back… several times…" After a long moment, Nara finally realized that Satou had to have meant the lab technician from four years ago. "Anyway…" Satou bent down to pick up the papers, and Nara, remembering that she was not here to socialize, hurriedly did the same.

Megure nodded in thanks as the two women handed the papers to him. He started to finger through the folders, looking for the proper places for the papers to go. Both Nara and Satou started back towards Satou's desk when Megure made a surprised sort of noise, and they turned back around. "This doesn't belong to the Kira case," he muttered, holding up one of the folders. It seemed a lot older and more worn than the others.

"Oh," Satou said in recognition, "That's… I know that folder. It's one of his… personal files. He keeps… a lot of case documents in there…"

"It probably got stuck in the pile by accident," Shiratori interjected from his desk.

"He probably needs it then. Take it out to him at Haido Park, Satou-san," Megure said, holding the folder out to her.

Satou started to take it when Nara heard herself blurt out, "I'll do it, Megure-keibu." She gave a short bow.

Megure looked slightly amused. "Do you know where Haido Park is, Nara-kun? You haven't been here in Tokyo long."

"I've been here to visit some relatives before," she replied, "I remember where it is."

"Alright," he replied, the amused look still on his face. He handed off the worn folder to her, and she held it gently in her hands. "Be on your way. When you've done that, come on back, unless someone needs you at the crime scene."

"Yes sir." She gave another bow to Megure, and inclined her head towards Satou. Satou smiled, though she still seemed a bit unhappy. It seemed that Kudo was not the only one whose mind was currently on this mysterious case from four years ago. Nara quickly made her way out the door.

Ten minutes later, she was regretting her eagerness to bring the folder to Kudo.

She was lost in the metropolis called Tokyo.

Stuck in a traffic jam, Nara thought about calling Yumi to ask for directions (she had already gotten Yumi's cell phone number, of course), but a quirky sort of personal pride kept her from doing that just yet. She was positive that she remembered what Haido Park looked like; if only she somehow drove near it, surely she would remember…?

It took her another fifteen minutes to finally make her way to the correct location. Fortunately, once she got there, the yellow tape and flashing cruiser lights made the crime scene easier to spot. Cursing her stupid pride, she spotted Satou's husband and quickly made her way to him, folder in hand.

"Takagi-san," she said with a hurried bow, "Could you tell me where Kudo-tantei is?"

Takagi turned his head from watching Chiba questioning a witness to look at her in surprise. "I'm sorry, Nara-san, but he already left."

"What?!"

"That's right. He said he had gotten enough information from the suspects and the crime scene to figure out who the murderer is, but he still wanted to test the substance he had found before he made any accusations."

Takagi sighed, and Nara gave him a questioning look. "What's wrong?"

"…Well… Kudo-san, he… he probably wouldn't have needed to have the substance tested before…" The man frowned. "I mean, he's only twenty-five, but I remember how he used to be, especially when he was a chi- uh, teenager… He used to be such a _brilliant_ detective, a perfect _Sherlock Holmes_… And it's not as if he isn't brilliant anymore; he still solves cases perfectly, but…"

"…But what?"

"…He never seems to believe in himself anymore." Nara blinked. "It's like… he doesn't trust himself or his deductions the way he used to… He's much more cautious… Now, Chiba-kun or Satou or I will sometimes come up with the same deduction at the same time… It's very strange…"

Suddenly, Takagi was staring at the folder in her hands. "If you want to get that to him soon, the quickest way would probably be to drive over to his house; that's where he was going. Most likely, he won't even come back out here. Sometimes, he'll call Chiba-kun or me and tell us his deduction if he's figured it out while he's somewhere else. …And don't worry," he added, with a small smile on his face, "his house isn't that far away."

So, once again, Nara found herself in the middle of Tokyo traffic, repeating Takagi's directions to Kudo's address over and over in her head like a prayer mantra. Fortunately, as she drove, she began to remember more and more of the layout of Beika. Before too long, she found herself driving slowly down his street, checking the nameplates next to the gates on the walls that surrounded the street's giant houses. She knew that Kudo had a famous novelist for a father and a famous actress for a mother, but she really hadn't been expecting his residence to be in such a grand neighboorhood. Then again, Satou had said he had a wife. It would make more sense for him to live in one of these mansions if he was not a bachelor.

"…Hmmm… that's not it…" she murmered to herself, her eyes scanning the nameplates carefully, "…not it… that's not it… not it… no, not 'Agasa'… not 'Ku- …wait, 'Kudo'?!" She braked (to her embarrassment, a little too sharply) and stared at the house, wide eyed. …Impressive. She envied the woman who was able to live here.

After finding a suitable parking spot on the street, she cautiously made her way through the partially opened gate and down the sidewalk to the house. She clutched the worn folder tightly to her chest. The closer she got to the house, the more she began feel that… something was wrong here… Almost at the door, she blinked in surprise, realizing that every window in the house was dark, save for a small light in one of the downstairs windows. She paused, glancing around. She didn't see any parked cars nearby. Maybe he had already left, to go back to the crime scene or to the offices to report? Nara sighed; being a delivery girl wasn't exactly what she had thought her first day as a Tokyo cop would be like, and she hoped she wouldn't become their permanent messenger, either.

She was about to turn and go, when suddenly, the front door caught her attention: it was open a crack. She frowned slightly. Had he forgotten to close the door all the way as he went inside, or perhaps when he left in a rush?" The second possibility seemed to be more likely, so like any good citizen, Nara placed her hand on the doorknob to close it (it would be embarrassing for some thief to raid a famous detective's mansion). Her intention was somehow lost on the way from her brain to her hand, however, and she pushed the door open just a bit. A little peek inside wouldn't hurt, would it? Ironic, she thought, that for a detective's mansion, the house seemed quite mysterious on the outside.

…And, of course, since the door was slightly open, it wouldn't be a sin to take a few steps inside, to get a better view…? Nara blinked several times as she stepped into the giant, dim foyer. Once her eyesight had adjusted, the first thing she noticed was that the place seemed barren. For a second, she even wondered if she had accidentally stepped into a vacant house. However, the giant staircase looked polished and clean, and the few household items scattered about the space were new and orderly, so the place surely had to be lived in.

The second thing she noticed was the quiet. There was not a sound in the house, save for the furtive ticking of a grandfather clock. It was unnerving really; when her shoes gave the faintest tap on the floor as she took another step inside, she almost scared herself out of her wits and screamed. Instead, she bit her lip and looked back and forth, wondering if the detective might appear from the doorway to the left, the right, or from up the stairs.

After discovering herself standing in the middle of the floor, she found that she could no longer stand the total silence. "K- …Kudo-san…? …Kudo-san, are you there?" Her voice came out in a whisper, but the giant room amplified it to a normal level. She paused for a long moment, giving him time to hear her and answer, in case he was in the middle of something important. She opened her mouth to quietly call out again.

Suddenly, there was an eruption of tiny clacks coming from the room to her right; within seconds, a small furry bundle came barreling through the doorway towards her. Nara's fright gave in to childish excitement immediately as the small, well-groomed dog, tiny claws clicking on the hard floor, came to a halt a few feet from her and eyed her warily. She squatted down to the dog's level only seconds later, a grin on her face and the back of her hand held out in a soothing manner for it to sniff. Dogs had always been her favorite animals.

"Well, hello there, little puppy-kun," she whispered, her tone growing babyish, "I didn't know Kudo-san had a dog. And aren't you just the most adorable little thing?" The grin faded from her lips, however, as the pup continued to stand still, staring at her in mistrust. Her voice returned to a normal whisper as she added, "Don't worry, puppy-kun, I'm only here to give your master this folder." She gestured to it. "Then I'll be on my way." Surprisingly, the dog's wariness waned slightly, as if it understood her words. "I work for the police, just like Kudo-san. See? Friend!" She held the back of her hand out a little more.

The dog seemed to understand her words yet again. Slowly, it padded forward and delicately sniffed her hand. After a moment, it gave a tiny, experimental lick. The smile returned full-force to Nara's face. Gently, she turned her hand around to pet the dog between its fluffy ears. The dog closed its eyes in pleasure.

"You really are just the cutest thing," Nara murmured, "You're a… Papillion, aren't you?" The soft tail wagged a bit. "I've always wanted a small dog like you, but I've always thought about getting a Pomeranian because they're so fluffy. But maybe I ought to get a Papillion; your fur is so silky and you seem so sweet."

Suddenly, she noticed the bright red collar around the Papillion's neck, which had been previously hidden by the dog's fur. "Oh? …Well, what's your name then?" Nara lifted up the small silver tag on the front of the collar and tilted it, catching a glimpse of the engraving in the light. "…'Love'? …Well, hello then, little Ai-chan. It's so very nice to meet a sweet girl like you." Ai's tail wagged again.

Abruptly, Nara realized that she still had the folder to deliver to Kudo. She shouldn't be standing in his house – uninvited – and petting his dog. Conspiratorially, she whispered, "Ai-chan, is your master around here anywhere? I need to give him the folder."

Without a second glance, the Papillion leaped up and shot off toward the right-hand room that she had come from. Startled, Nara stood up and took a few steps forward, wondering if Ai had simply decided to run off or actually wanted her to follow; however, the loud sound her shoes made on the hard floor caused her to pause. She waited for a long moment to see if the Papillion would come back, but she didn't.

Feeling stupid for just standing there in the middle of the foyer, Nara cautiously made her way towards the doorway to the room, clutching the folder tightly to her chest. The silence had descended once more around her, save for the ticking of the passing of time. And time was passing slowly; each step she took felt like its own eternity. Before she knew it, though, she was standing in the doorway and looking in.

There was Ai, lying curled up in a silky ball on a red cushion on the floor. Nara blinked, about to question the dog about why she had run off like that, when Ai's head suddenly lifted up from the pillow and she turned her short, pointed muzzle towards something in the room to Nara's right. Nara turned her own head to see what the dog was looking at.

"Oh…!" Almost dropping the folder, Nara stepped back several paces, her mouth remaining open after her quiet hiss of surprise. "Oh, oh!" she finally continued in a rushed whisper, "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to intrude! I just came in because I was looking for Kudo-tantei to give him this folder, and I saw the dog, and then it rushed in here and I thought maybe… I… I'm sorry, I… I… I…?"

Slowly her mouth closed and she blinked.

The woman sitting in the hard straight-backed chair had not recognized her existence or moved in any way. Her head was bent over the large book situated in her afghan-covered lap; its text was illuminated by the light of the single small lamp Nara had seen from outside. She could not discern the woman's profiled face clearly through her hair, but seeing no movement, she almost thought for a long horrified second that the woman was dead. A moment later, a pale graceful hand reached up and turned the page of the book. Nara gulped.

"Um… Excuse me… but, uh… is Kudo-tantei here?" The woman in the chair did not answer. "…Um, ma'am …?" Ai stood up on her cushion, but the woman did not take any notice of it. A little louder, Nara asked again, "Is Kudo-tantei here, ma'am?" Still nothing.

Nara listened to the clock ticking in the foyer. If Kudo wasn't here, she needed to leave and head back to the office. Making one more attempt at communication, Nara stepped forward a bit more, and suddenly, it hit her.

The woman was in a wheelchair.

Nara hadn't realized it at first because someone had taken great inventive pains to cover up the fact that the chair had wheels attached. In surprise, she glanced up at the woman's face, but behind a pair of large, black-rimmed glasses, the blue-green eyes were fixated on the text in her lap. Suddenly feeling extraordinarily uncomfortable, Nara backed up towards the doorway. She opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it.

Not knowing what else to do, Nara turned and headed out of the room. Hearing the clicking of tiny claws behind her, she glanced back around as she walked to see the Papillion standing in the doorway, staring at her solemnly. She was about to say goodbye to Ai, when suddenly, she slammed right into something hard and solid.

With a gasp, she stumbled backwards, clutching the folder tightly, gawking at the blue suit in front of her. She glanced upwards to see unfocused eyes staring down at her in puzzlement.

"Kudo-tantei! …I'm so sorry! I wasn't looking where I was going, and… I…" The detective's eyes were not on her face anymore, but the folder.

"Thank you, Nara-kun," he murmured, taking it out of her hands and effectively shutting her up. "I was looking for this. I thought I had left it at home, but when I didn't see it in here, I went back out to check my car. I suppose I left them at the office by accident; thank you again for bringing them to me." With quiet elegance, he flipped the folder open and began to leisurely scan the precious documents inside.

Nara watched him for a long moment, feeling that something was not right. Finally she realized what it was. "Um, Kudo-tantei… How… do you know my name…? And what I was doing here?"

Kudo looked at her with mild surprise. "I saw you at the office with Satou-san, of course. I remembered that our transfer from Osaka was coming in today, even if no one else did, and my friend Hattori Heiji had already called me several days ago to tell me who you were. …It was all too elementary, really." He turned his attention back to the folder. Nara blinked. Elementary, indeed. She hadn't thought that Kudo had even noticed her at all as he had stormed in and out of the offices.

A tiny clicking sound caused Nara's eyes to drop to the floor. The Papillion had come to sit next to her, flowing tail wagging as she gazed up at her master. A moment later, Kudo noticed the dog as well, and for the first time that Nara had seen, he smiled. He dropped down into a squat, and Ai immediately came padding forward, giving a half-jump to rest her front paws on Kudo's knee. The man petted her fondly behind the ears, and Nara saw that the distractedness in Kudo's eyes had been replaced by the sort of affection that she could only remember seeing on young fathers' faces before.

"Hello there, sweetheart," she heard him whisper to the dog. Ai gave a short bark, and Kudo laughed as the pup launched herself upwards onto his chest. With one arm around the silky bundle and the other arm holding the folder tightly, Kudo stood back up with a grin. Ai gave him a small lick on the cheek. "This is my little girl, Ai-chan," he informed Nara, and she was certain now that Kudo looked exactly like a proud father. Nara smiled back in acquiescence.

Suddenly, Ai barked sharply in Kudo's ear and began to wiggle in his grasp. "Okay, okay! I'm going!" Kudo stepped past Nara and began to make his way towards the right-hand doorway, burying his face in the pup's furry neck for a moment. Nara watched in silence until he was out of sight in the next room, after which her mind kicked back in and she realized that she was still standing there in Kudo's foyer having completed her mission but not having been dismissed. She wondered what to do. Kudo hadn't seemed upset to find her in his house, but did he want her to stay now or go?

Not wanting to make any more mistakes (such as not asking for directions), she figured that it would be best to follow. He might need her to do something involving the case at Haido Park. Quickly, she tiptoed her way across the hard floor and poked her head in the doorway.

Kudo was standing there, still with dog and folder in hand, looking at the bespectacled woman reading in her wheelchair. Nara saw that the vague expression had slammed back down over his face, though this time, there was some other emotion mixed in. She studied him with an investigative eye. At first she thought his face displayed amusement or tenderness, but a second later, his expression seemed to show signs of sorrow or pity, maybe even shame or… guilt? She wondered what it was about this woman that seemed to have Kudo so mixed up.

"I'm home, love," he spoke to her, in a tone that rather surprised Nara. His voice was calm and even, but rather loud. The woman, however, didn't move a muscle. Nara wondered how she could ignore him like that; he was standing right in front of her. He did not seem at all bothered by this, though. Instead, he raised his voice a few more decibels and said, "Shiho."

Suddenly, the woman's head shot up, and her eyes, magnified by the glasses' super thick lenses, trained themselves on Kudo immediately. The cold, serious look in her eyes seemed to soften – just the tiniest bit – before a dry smirk flickered onto her face. "Hello, Kudo-kun," Shiho answered in surprising disdain, and Nara almost flinched. Shiho's voice was raspy and low, like a very old woman that had been smoking for many decades, and the heavy sarcasm in her voice did nothing to mitigate it. "Back so soon?"

Instead of answering, Kudo merely walked over to her, adjusting the dog in his arms. Immediately, the textbook in her lap was closed and tucked between an afghan-covered leg and the side of the chair to make room as Ai jumped straight out of Kudo's arms to fill up the cleared-off space. As the dog landed with a thump on Shiho's lap, Nara expected the woman to at least twitch at the sudden weight. Shiho did nothing except place her hand on the Papillion's back and stroke her softly. Here again, Nara saw parental affection in the eyes, though it did not last as long as it had on Kudo's.

Kudo continued to move towards her until he was at her right side, leaning down and giving her a chaste kiss. It was not even a kiss on the lips, but on the cheek. Shiho's eyes had closed for a moment as he did this, reopening to stare up at him as he straightened up. "What do you have for me?" Her raspy voice was filled with amusement lightly veiled behind irritation.

"Strange substance," he replied immediately - his speaking volume still raised - and he dropped the worn folder into her lap next to the dog, "Found near a body at Haido Park. I believe it's narcotics, but I'd like you to test it, if you have the time." He dug down into his suit pocket and came up with a small plastic bag shut with a wire tie. Inside was an off-white powder.

"Oh? …Would you like that tested as soon as possible, or whenever I feel like it?"

"Well, I've got Takagi-san and Chiba-san out on the scene at the moment, and I'm guessing they don't want to have to spend the night there," Kudo retorted casually, dropping the plastic bag onto the folder.

Shiho gave a raspy sigh and petted the dog. "I suppose, then, if it's so time-critical… No, Ai-chan, don't sniff the drugs. They can be bad and do all sorts of… unexpected things, you know…" Shiho was suddenly staring at Kudo intently. "If you think it's narcotics, why does it need testing? Isn't your instinct good enough?"

Kudo didn't answer, but slipped his hand onto her right shoulder under her short, strawberry blonde hair and let it lay there. Shiho seemed to make a point of ignoring this unusual gesture by staring back down at the folder and the bag in her lap. Ai leaned her head against Shiho's chest, her muzzle buried in the woman's sweater, and Shiho ran her fingers along the Papillion's back absentmindedly.

The emergence of the tableau startled Nara. They looked exactly like a traditional family: father, mother, and child. And yet, though each one was there and connected by touch, the three pairs of eyes were each staring off distantly in different directions.

"All right," Shiho finally muttered, and coughed. Nara hoped that the cough would rid the woman of her rasp, but when Shiho continued, it was still present. "Just… give me a few minutes to set the testing up."

"That's fine," Kudo murmured, his voice suddenly losing its volume. The Papillion lay down on Shiho's lap, resting her muzzle on the worn folder. Suddenly, Nara realized that he was being serious about this woman in the wheelchair testing the powder. She really hadn't been sure, with the sarcasm in both of their voices, that they weren't just teasing each other about some inside joke. Nara wondered how Shiho would test the powder: certainly not by using it (Nara almost laughed at this idea). Knowing from Hattori Heiji-tantei how deep Kudo always was into his work, Nara realized that it probably wouldn't be surprising for the detective to have some kind of forensics lab in his house, especially if someone else living there knew enough about science to help him utilize it.

Wait, Nara thought. When Satou had been talking about the case from four years ago, she had said…

"…_injured our top lab technician in the most… horrible way…" _

Lab technician… injured… Nara stared at the woman, with her raspy voice and bad hearing and thick-lensed glasses and wheelchair. Surely not…

Suddenly, Kudo was looking right at Nara, and she realized with a start that she had forgotten that she was only an observer, that she had nothing whatsoever to do with the scene in front of her. She opened her mouth to apologize, but Kudo subtly shook his head, a distant smile on his face. She froze, and watched as he leaned over Shiho again, expecting him to kiss her. Instead, his hand reached past her face, brushing the strawberry blonde hair out of the way.

"You need to turn this up a bit; who knows when you might need to hear something?" he spoke loudly, and his hand fingered the small plastic device hanging over her ear.

With an annoyed frown, Shiho swatted his hand away. "I know. If it's silent in here too long, it starts buzzing." Suddenly, she reached up and adjusted her black-rimmed glasses.

And Nara finally noticed the lonely, small gold band on the ring finger of Shiho's left hand.

So that was why Kudo – and everyone else – could not forget the case from four years ago.

Something inside of her was telling Nara that she needed to go. She looked at Kudo intently for a moment, and the detective discretely lifted his eyes to meet hers. This time, he gave a barely perceptible nod and smile.

Nara returned the smile and pulled away from the doorway. She tiptoed towards the front door, careful not to make any sound on the hard wood. She didn't want to disturb the two people and the dog in the next room. She wondered what to say once she got back to the office, then realized that it was easy: she had successfully delivered the folder to Kudo-san. That was that. What else could she say?

As she closed the front door to the giant house, the last thing she heard from inside the foyer was the perpetual ticking of the grandfather clock.


	5. Inertia: Part III

**Fandom: **Detective Conan

**Title: **Inertia: Part III

**Author: **Eeveebeth Fejvu

**Theme: **#17 – Black Wings; Wings

**Pairing/Characters: **Kudo Shinichi and Miyano Shiho

**Rating: **T for sexuality and violence

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Detective Conan_. I requested Haibara to make me a pill that would somehow turn me into the creator of the shrunken tantei-san, but my order is in line behind the antidote to Apoptoxin-4869. …So, for now, I write fan fiction.

**Summary:** "Please, oneesan. …Help me to be useful to him."

**Author's Note: **This is Part 3 of 3 of the "Inertia" collection; however, each section mostly stands on its own.

* * *

Shiho felt the sheets shift behind her on the bed. That accursed hearing aid had been placed on the nightstand next to her thick-lensed glasses, so not even a faint rustling broke the silence in her head. The air in the room felt muggy, empty. Shinichi had cracked the bedroom window before climbing into bed, but the paltry breeze slipping in through the crevice did nothing but transport a peculiar mix of fresh-but-grimy Tokyo air to her sensitive nose.

Her head resting on the pillow, she stared into the darkness of their bedroom. She had realized several years ago that staring into the dark was almost like being able to see without glasses again. Her eyes did not burn in the dark as they did in the light; the world did not seem blurry to her when she could not see the outlines of the furniture anyway.

It was ironic, really. She had spent so much of her childhood in the dark that when she had been finally exposed to the light, she had hesitated on the edge, wanting and willing to stay in the shadows. But he had gradually coaxed her out, brought her out into the sunshine, and for a while, she had been something like happy – for, of course, she could never be _just happy_; she had been in the dark too long to ever be _just happy_.

And the light had not lasted forever, as she had always intelligently and logically known it wouldn't, even when she had pushed such thoughts to the back of her mind. First, the light had been obscured by some sudden clouds, creating an overcast sky. And then, dark storm clouds had suddenly shut out the sun and had plunged her, and everyone around her, back into darkness.

It had almost been a permanent and eternal darkness, for her at least, but something had kept her from giving in and letting go. Perhaps it had been the hot tears on the back of her hand or the sound of her true given name – lacking any honorific – called out in his captivating voice. Regardless of what it was, she had suddenly found herself not surrounded by darkness or light, but by a nightmarish distortion of both. All she could see was a blur, nothing concrete anymore, just a mix of black and white and the shades in between, a crazed artist's abstract gothic masterpiece.

And here she was, four years later, lying next to the man who had originally coaxed her out into the sunshine, the man who had hurdled into the darkness after her or maybe had simply been dragged down as she grasped for any hold she could find. She had never decided which.

She felt the bed moving beneath her as her husband rolled over in his sleep. About fifteen minutes ago she had sensed his breathing pattern relax into slumber through the steady vibration of the mattress. For a long moment, she continued to stare out into the darkness in silence.

Then, in a sudden burst of restlessness, she found herself turning over onto her back and struggling to prop herself upright. Her inept, unfeeling legs pulled at her heaving body, but she had practiced sitting up so many times during her extensive rehab that the dead weight did not jerk her off balance. With a raspy grunt of exertion, she leaned her head over her own body, her short hair falling about her face, and braced herself with her right hand against the mattress. After a breath, she turned her eyes to Shinichi, but she could see only a blackened blur.

A soft, raspy sigh escaped her lips. She rubbed her left thumb up and down her left ring finger, feeling the absence of any engagement ring but feeling the wedding band cold against her skin. She was not tired enough to drop right off. What had happened to those long-ago days when she would nearly faint from exhaustion after working twenty or more hours straight in the lab?

The repetitive (and admittedly boring) forensics testing that she still performed for Shinichi's cases did not tire her out. Nevertheless, she completed every test thoroughly and accurately, as if it were one of her own personal experiments. After all, she wanted to be useful in some way. That was all she wanted, when it came right down to it; to just be useful to him was enough to satisfy her, especially after That Night, when all of her apparent worth had seemed to evaporate in an instant.

In return for her sudden uselessness, however, she had received more of him than she had ever dared to hope for. She had received his total commitment to her in the form of a plain gold ring. She wondered, sometimes, how strong their marriage vows were. After all, his original commitment so long ago had come in the form of an ally's offhanded promise to always protect her from harm, and in the end, that promise had become an unintentional lie.

Shiho was certain that that particular broken promise was the reason that he had chosen to break off his long-awaited engagement to the Angel, why he had chosen to do anything and everything he could to help her as she began the long road to semi-recovery. She knew this was why he had insisted on sacrificing a life of happiness with the one woman he truly loved for a life filled with such trials, such pain, such misery. Nothing could ever relieve him of his guilt except to rot in it.

The arm that was supporting her body was beginning to shake, so she carefully let herself down onto the mattress, facing Shinichi's blurry, sleeping face. She would not be upset with him if she ever found out he was having an extramarital affair with his former fiancée. Of course, she was sure that Ran's pride, and his pride as well, would never allow it: but she would not blame either of them if it did. It was only fair, for as utterly humiliating as it was, there was nothing that Shinichi's paralyzed wife could do for his corporal needs.

That was where she was useless the most. Every day, they went through the same pattern. He would get up and take a shower, then wake her up, carry her to the bathroom, and assist her in washing herself. Then he would help her dry, help her get her clothes on, help her get comfortable in her wheelchair. He would rush to get himself dressed as she fixed him a quick breakfast, and then he was out the door to work. She would stay home, sometimes reading, sometimes playing with the Papillion, mostly staring out the window and thinking. Throughout the day, he might come home for lunch or to give her some forensics evidence to test, or Agasa-hakase might walk over from next door to check on his adopted daughter, or the three teenagers might drop by after school for tutoring on chemistry homework.

Then, as the afternoon passed away, he would come home to the dinner she had prepared, and they would eat together, sometimes at the table and sometimes in front of the fireplace. They would retire to the library after that, where he might read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle aloud to her and ignore her blunt criticisms of his favorite stories, or he might explain the cases he worked on that day and try to get her to guess the culprit before he finished with the dramatic denouement. And she would relate to him stories of Agasa-hakase's current outrageous inventions, or the latest high school mystery exploits of Ayumi, Genta, and Mitsuhiko. Then, it was back to the bathroom, where he would help her wash and dry again and change into pajamas. He would carry her to their bedroom and she would lie on the bed, waiting as he prepared for bed himself. When he was ready, he would come up and climb under the sheets next to her.

And he would go to sleep, while she would stare into the dark and think. It wasn't as if this abrupt ending to each day had been the original plan. There had been nights where they had tried, tried so hard to make it work. She was his wife and he was her husband, after all, and it was something that husbands and wives did. And it only seemed fair after all they had been through, that each deserved something to look forward to after the sun went down.

He would pull her close, and she would wrap her arms around him and they would kiss in the same manner as their intellectual quarrels, deep and unrelenting. Then she would bury her face in his neck and slowly unbutton his nightshirt one button at a time. So patient were his hands as they moved up and down her back, caressing her skin beneath the nightgown. He was good at ignoring the raised scars at the base of her spine, the ancient bullet wounds, almost to the point where she forgot about them herself. But neither could forget the repulsive facts once his hands would roam lower, because she would open her eyes and look at him unknowingly and ask why he had stopped touching her, and he would suddenly and hideously start to cry because he hadn't. And she would realize all over again that she would never be able to feel what he sought to give her, and she would press her torso closer to him and her fingers would skim his bare skin and she would try her very best to give him what he wanted and what would please him. But he would always stop her. If she could not have this pleasure, he did not want it for himself. It was not fair, in his opinion, though all his refusal did was make her want to scream at him in her raspy voice and beat her fists against him again and again.

And that was why she would never blame him if she heard of an affair.

Shiho found, to her relief, that her eyelids were becoming heavy. Sleep, consoling slumber, was fast approaching. She relaxed her head into the pillow and stared into the dark at where Shinichi's form would be. For a long moment, she waited for her eyes to close, but they refused to shut any more than halfway. She felt a chill pass over her, and she allowed herself to wish childishly that she were warm in the encircling embrace of his arms. But he was asleep, and she would rather die than wake him for something as trivial as that passing notion. Instead, she found the energy to give a halfhearted scoot towards him, drawing his inviting body closer, and upon sensing one of his hands resting on the sheet nearby, she reached her hand out to lay it softly on top of his.

_Please. _She found herself praying as she did every night, her eyelids beginning to droop lower. _Please._ She did not pray to any god, but to the only celestial guardian that she was sure was out there somewhere. _Please, oneesan. Please, Akemi, my sister… help me. Help me to be useful to him. Help me to be strong. Help me to be… Help me to be at least a halfway worthy replacement for _her_… Please… Please, oneesan… Please… Please…_

It was not long before her restless mind found itself deep in her usual nightmare.

Shiho had walked into the office that morning a few minutes late for once. Her punctuality, disrupted by (of course) a dead body on the highway, had triggered her to clutch her Fusae purse and manila folders with a bit more ferocity than usual. And perhaps her irritation had shown on her face, for most of the officers and lab techs still milling about the main lobby beat a hasty retreat towards the stairs to avoid her cutting glare in the elevator. Finally arriving on the floor that housed the forensics department, she was surprised to find Kudo waiting for her, leaning against her desk with arms crossed and head down. The "sudden clouds" had created that overcast sky in her life not too long before: Kudo had finally gotten his fiancée and all of his energies had seemed to be directed in the appropriate direction - Ran. And Shiho had made it even easier for him by avoiding him as much as possible.

Seeing his solemn expression, she raised an eyebrow in mock interest and questioned why he was not out on the highway investigating the most recent victim of his "if-I-go-anywhere-near-you-you'll-probably-drop-dead" curse. In response, he stated that the string of connected murders he had recently been investigating involved the remaining loose ends of the Organization.

She had always known that all of the members had not been eliminated. Of course, he did as well. All of them did. There were no more _important_ members loose, but out on the streets still skulked the ones that had been clutching onto the syndicate's black coattails: the common burglars, murderers, scientists, and corrupt businessmen; the ones that had remained attached to society and were only linked to the Organization through their black market income. Most had seemingly gone back to their former lives, carrying out their illegal acts alone or attempting to turn legit. But many had not been happy that their well-paying source of income had been utterly destroyed by the law, and several had tried to gather themselves into small gangs in an attempt to create a new order of the dead syndicate. They ran around in their black trench coats and fedoras and sunglasses, stealing and experimenting and killing; but they missed the whole point of the organization. There was no goal, no purpose for these copycat bands, other than creating general chaos and anarchy. They were not the Black Organization; but she, Kudo, and the police knew that they still needed to be stopped before one of them finally figured out how the original syndicate had stayed so secret and so powerful for so long.

Kudo had been given authority over all matters concerning the Black Organization by his superiors, so it was up to him to figure out a strategy for bringing them in. He told her that he had been thinking over the issue all night and had come to the conclusion that he only wanted to take a small group on his raid at the dockside warehouses that he had discovered were their "headquarters". By his deductions, there were only three or four in the particular band he was investigating, and they seemed to be the sort that would easily turn tail and run if the odds were against them. He had asked Takagi and Satou if they would accompany him and both had readily agreed. And now, he was asking her if she cared to join them.

She informed him acidly that she was, in fact, neither a police officer nor a detective, but a scientist who was currently trying to get to her desk to finish some paperwork. He replied genially that he had gotten permission from his superiors for her to come along, seeing as how she had always been considered by the higher-ups in the department as their trump card on information regarding the Organization. He even held his private manila folder (full of classified information concerning the syndicate) in front of her face, as if trying to entice her with something that she had wanted to leave behind. Somehow, with those disturbingly blue eyes of his penetrating her own, it had not been long before she had given in, slapped her own files down on her desk, and peevishly followed Kudo back to the detectives' offices.

It was late afternoon before the raid took place. There had been preparations, double-checking, observing of the "headquarters", and a thousand other miscellaneous tasks that had to be completed before the three detectives and the chemist found themselves sneaking towards the unsuspecting warehouse, each with their hands clutching their loaded and ready guns.

And then the dark storm clouds of the Organization had suddenly shut out her sun, ready to plunge her, and everyone around her, back into the darkness.

The entire band of miscreants – totaling four, as Kudo had deducted – had abruptly emerged from the warehouse, oblivious to the equally large band of law enforcers about to drop in on them. However, at the first shouts of "put your hands in the air and drop your weapons!" the criminals panicked and ran, splitting up to escape in different directions. Kudo had immediately split his team up as well, a member to each criminal. Shiho had hesitated for a second; something in her was screaming that this wasn't the wisest thing to do. But Kudo, as always, was dead set on his actions, and the criminals were getting further away, so she dashed off in pursuit.

She ran for a while without seeing the man that she was chasing, clutching her gun tightly in both hands. Soon enough, the warehouses and the giant metal shipping containers all around her began to look alike, and she realized that she was becoming disoriented in the labyrinth of steel walls. Finally, however, she caught up with him. Her criminal had foolishly run into a dead end, and he had no visible weaponry on him. With a cry of alarm, he turned around to see the barrel of a gun pointed straight at his heart, but to Shiho's sudden horror, he began to claw at his vest. She could see in his eyes an expression of fatalistic acceptance that she knew too well; she had worn something very similar on her own face before she had put the apoptoxin to her lips for the first time.

Cursing, she retreated, dashing as fast as she could towards the nearest shipping container, watching him fumbling with crisscrossed wires and duct tape. With a few steps to go, she forgot running and instead gave a great leap behind her shelter. It was just in time. The bomb exploded with an unexpectedly thunderous reverberation that pinned her flat to the ground with its intensity. As had been her hope, the shipping container protected her from most of the debris that flew past her. Her hands struggled to get to her ears where she lay facedown on the ground, and she coughed, choking on the dust. She waited for what seemed like ages before shakily getting to her feet.

She placed a hand on the side of the container to support herself, wondering if she dared poke her head around the corner to glimpse the gruesome scene. How desperate they had gotten, these men, to deviate so far from the syndicate's original methods. Though it was not particularly unlike the Organization for a member to kill oneself when cornered by law enforcement, it was unlikely that a cocktail member would have ever rigged themselves up to explode. That was suicide, after all. What were they planning next? Kudo had only connected them to a string of murders… Wait… Kudo. He needed to know about the bomb, as did Satou and Takagi. Perhaps the other criminals were rigged as well.

And that was when she noticed it. The reverberations of the bomb seemed to still be going off in her head, though now a sort of ringing had invaded her ears. She shook her head in aggravation, and the ringing began to clear, though it was being replaced by copious amounts of cotton. In growing frustration and a hint of dread, she dug her fingers into her ears violently, then withdrew them to listen again. Her eyes widened. Why was that muffled feeling still plaguing her?

All too late she felt a horribly familiar sensation crash over her, that unprovoked terror she had always associated with danger. Only a slight breeze as a rope passed in front of her face clued her in before she suddenly began to choke. Immediately, her hands flew to the restricting cable, trying to tear it away, but it only tightened. A ragged cry escaped her; pain was clouding her eyesight, but she tried to hang on to her reason and not panic. Where was her gun?! She cursed mentally. It had to be laying on the ground where she had fallen, now out of reach. She felt the heavy vibrations of their footsteps on the ground, one… two… All three of the other criminals were here; they had snuck up behind her and captured her with a noose made of fishing net rope.

Her fingers tore at the binding, and she gagged as the criminal holding her captive tugged her backwards. She was forced to step with him until he had pulled her into his arms. Internally she shuddered as he drew her still closer, tugging violently on the rope to keep her in a state of half suffocation. The three men were talking to each other in panicked tones, but the feeling of cotton was still in her ears so she couldn't really make out what they were saying. Suddenly, however, one began to yell loudly and she heard him well, though his words suddenly made her wish that she hadn't.

"Drop your guns! …We mean it! You don't, we'll kill Sherry!" The rope tightened more, and Shiho felt something snap in her throat. She choked and tried to blink away the moisture blinding her eyes. She could see them several yards away: Satou, Takagi, and Kudo. All three were slowly lowering their guns and leaning down to place them gently on the ground. She cursed in her mind. She was a hostage, and what was worse, they knew exactly who she was, or at least who she had been. She wondered if her unique hair had given her away; it had always caused her problems.

"Now back away… slowly!" The three detectives did as they were told, their hands hesitantly held up in the air. Instead of rewarding them for their cooperation, however, the criminal holding her did not loosen the rope. Suddenly, she found herself being dragged backwards, and her feet instinctually moved along with them. "Stay there or we'll kill her!" She cursed in her mind once more. So they weren't going to release her; they were taking her with them. There was another offense to add to their several counts of homicide and other various activities, Shiho thought sarcastically, half in delirium. One count of assault and kidnapping.

Before the criminals dragged her out of the detectives' sight, her eyes locked onto Kudo's. From the intensity of his stare, she knew the message he was sending her.

And then her associates were out of her range of vision, and she was forced to run to keep up with the criminal holding the rope around her neck. She dug her fingers into the noose and managed to open up a little space, but her captor noticed and immediately gave a quick jerk, causing her to gasp violently and almost trip.

The rest of the journey back to their hideout in the warehouse was a blur. The next thing she remembered clearly was the rope slackening just enough for her to get a good (though painful) breath of air before several hands gripped her shoulders and legs offensively, picked her up, and threw her roughly into an unknown container. She hit the floor with a smack, and as she lay stunned, she heard the screech of a lock and her surroundings grew dark. For a moment, she was silent and still, listening through the cotton to the voices of her captors fade away. Then, she forced herself to lifted her head and look around. As she became used to the dim light, she was surprised to find herself in what was an almost familiar setting.

It was like being in one of the Organization's laboratories again, albeit much smaller. There were several shifty racks of carefully labeled vials, containers of solutions, water bottles, and Bunsen burners, a metal table with a closed laptop on top of it, and some plain cardboard boxes all crammed haphazardly in the small space. So this small band of miscreants had not only been interested in killing, but in the sciences, she thought. That explained the potent suicide bomb and how they had known immediately that she was Sherry, former head of apoptoxin research. The portability of the equipment quickly led her to another conclusion, namely that she was in the back of the criminals' getaway vehicle, probably some unmarked white service van.

In a few moments she was standing, tightly clutching onto one of the shaky shelves. She knew she had to focus on getting out of the locked hold, rather than the pain in her ears, throat, and across her whole body, but that simple task was getting harder to do with every moment that passed. Observing the meager equipment available to her, she quickly decided that the best way to open the door would be to have her kidnappers do it for her.

With a grunt of exertion, she slammed her side into the door as she had seen Kudo do to locked doors, though she had no intention of breaking it down. Perhaps if she had the martial arts skills of Kudo's fiancée, but... Though leaving no visible dent, her actions caused a great, metallic racket, which was enhanced by the shaking of the shelves in the compartment. Twice more she repeated the slam until she fell wildly back into the metal table. Bracing herself against its cold surface, she listened desperately, trying to hear the sound of her freedom coming through the cotton sensation… And there it was; footsteps, pounding the concrete and almost to the van. Whichever one of her captors was coming let out a curse of frustration. Though barely on her feet, Shiho turned resolutely towards the door. There was a metallic screech as the handle turned.

Shiho did not even hesitate long enough to see if the man had a gun. Seconds after he wrenched the door wildly open, the criminal howled in pain, clutching his profusely bleeding nose, and staggered back from the opening. Shiho lowered her foot back to the floor, amazed at the power behind the simple kick she had employed. Mouri-san would be proud, she thought.

The man recovered faster than she had predicted, however; halfway out the van's doorway, she had to retreat back into the compartment as he staggered angrily towards her. At the last second, he lunged ungracefully forward and caught a hold of the leg of her pants. She felt herself fall backwards and threw her arms out to catch her, though all she managed to do was upset one of the shifting racks as her fingers caught onto the edge. Gasping for breath after hitting the floor, she saw too late the vessels plummeting towards her. Glass vials shattered and canisters burst open around her, bathing her in jagged shards and unknown chemical solutions. She got an entire face-full of one fetid liquid as it splashed from its busted iron container into her open eyes. She shut them immediately, shaking her head and kicking out blindly. A groan and a thud rewarded her flailing, and she paused, trying to slow her erratic breathing.

Shiho's eyes were beginning to sting, so she kept them closed as she pulled herself onto her knees and ran her hands gently over the wet, glass-strewn floor. The criminal must have been knocked unconscious, she reasoned, for as she strained to listen, she could hear no more sounds of movement. Slowly, she pulled herself onto her feet again and held lightly onto the edge of the unstable rack. She sucked in a deep breath – she sounded raspy even to herself – and tried to think, but her eyes, which had begun to sting harder, disrupted her concentration. She rubbed at them with her damp sleeve and tried to remember what had been written on the label of the container she had glimpsed as it fell. It had been in English, but she knew the language well, so she had had no difficulties in recognizing the letters as a chemical formula. But what had it been exactly…? And suddenly, realizing what sort of container the solution had been in, she remembered. The label had read "NaOH". The substance was sodium hydroxide.

Shiho cursed violently in her head. Blindly, she reached down towards where she remembered seeing the bottles of water. When she finally closed her searching fingers around one, she twisted off the cap, tilted her head back, and poured the contents directly onto her eyes. She scrubbed at the skin around the eyelids venomously, then cautiously opened her eyes to rinse them out; it was a struggle, but she felt she was managing it well, all things considered. As the last of the water in the bottle trickled down the front of her shirt, she suddenly gasped at the discomfort and exhaustion that had overtaken her body. At that moment, she wanted nothing more than to go back home to Agasa-hakase's, crawl into bed, and sleep off the aching that had consumed her…

Her pained eyes abruptly opened. Gunshot! She swore she had just heard a gunshot through the cotton sensation. Motionless, she listened intently and clutched the edge of the stable metal counter. There it was again – another shot! Water droplets still streaming down her face like tears, she immediately stumbled passed the chemical carnage and motionless kidnapper, lurched out of the doors of the service van – which was indeed white and unmarked – and paused as the giant, nondescript warehouse she was in came into a hazy focus. Several more gunshots sounded, and Shiho's head whipped around towards the source. There was the giant door to the warehouse, opened just enough for a person to squeeze through. She squinted, then staggered for the door as she heard another few shots go off. She had to warn Satou, Takagi, and Kudo about the suicide bombs – though she was sure, after her scuffle, that at least one of the three remaining criminals did not have any explosive devices on their person.

She finally came to the warehouse door and paused in the crack. In the late afternoon light she could see Satou and Takagi standing several yards away, their guns drawn, yelling at the criminals to put down their weapons. Satou had received some sort of injury to the forehead that was bleeding profusely and clearly disrupting her vision, though the officer never once seemed distracted. Takagi seemed to have a hard time holding his gun; the back of his knuckles were red with blood. Closer to her and directly in front of her stood Kudo, posed in an almost comically heroic position in the midst of the battle. His blue blazer was unbuttoned and was swinging around his body like a cape, and his face was locked in an expression of deep concentration as he gripped the gun in his hand tightly. He surely is Superman, Shiho thought.

She considered how best to help, ignoring her critically injured state. She turned her eyes to the criminals, who were barricaded behind a shipping container farther down the dock. As one poked his head out and gave a quick shot at the detectives – he missed – Shiho could see that he had a bleeding shoulder wound. Kudo and the others were making some progress, then.

Shiho turned her eyes back to Kudo and squinted. He was standing out in the open, even though Satou and Takagi were standing near a shipping container for quick access to cover. And suddenly, he stopped shooting. Shiho's eyes widened. Though he was keeping his eyes trained on the criminals' blockade, he was trying to reload his weapon in the middle of the shootout. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Shiho wanted to scream.

And then his gun jammed, and his eyes shifted down to the object in his hands to see what had gone wrong. In that second, Shiho sensed more than watched one of the criminals throw himself around the container, gun held high and aimed at Kudo.

Her mind barely registered any thought as she sprang to life, tearing across the dock towards the detective. She only knew that she had to get to him before the bullets did, knock him down to the ground or push him to safety behind the shipping container that Satou and Takagi had fled behind. As she ran, a strange sensation came over her, and she began to feel as if she were in a trance: the thunderous sounds of gunshots were muffled, her breath was coming in hard gasps, and her eyes were burning fiercely despite the washing. She almost felt as if she was out of her own body, simply a spectator of her own movements.

A second before she reached him, his blue eyes flickered up from the gun and towards her, seeing her for the first time. His eyes widened in surprise, but she didn't have time to do anything except get him out of the line of fire. Shiho dove at him, ready to pull him down and out of harm's way.

She felt a sharp crack across the lower part of her back, and everything went black.

With a start, Shiho woke up.

For a long moment, she lay on her back, gasping for breath through her damaged throat. Finally, she relaxed and sighed in aggravation. What a realistic nightmare that had been; the haunting memory of _that night_. The ancient bullet wounds on her back were even throbbing as if fresh. With a groan, Shiho struggled to gain a sitting position on the mattress. Accomplishing this, she blinked and glanced around, her sight blurred. She was safe in her and Shinichi's bedroom. Morning light was streaming in through the window. It was a new day.

She glanced to the left towards her nightstand and was just able to read the numbers on the digital clock. She stared in surprise. How had it gotten so late?! She whipped her head around to Shinichi's side of the bed, only to find that he was missing. She frowned. Why hadn't he woken her up?

With a snort of irritation, she turned back to her nightstand only to notice the small piece of paper lying next to the clock. She reached for her black-rimmed glasses and set them in place, and the world instantly came into focus. She reached for the note and, reading it, grumbled to herself. So, he had thought that she had looked so exhausted yesterday that he hadn't had the heart to wake her up this morning. How… considerate. But what was she supposed to do? Stay in bed all day and sleep? According to his note, yes, or at least until he came back from the department for lunch.

With indignant and mutinous thoughts, Shiho let herself flop back down onto the mattress. She stared sullenly at the note for a long moment, then violently crumpled it up and threw it at the closed bedroom door, where it bounced off and landed harmlessly on the floor. There. Let him pick it up himself.

For a while, however, she did as he had suggested, burying her head back into the pillow to block out the sunlight. She managed to doze off for a bit after the pain from the old wounds subsided, and once she woke up from her dreamless sleep, she felt less exhausted; with this newfound energy, though, came restlessness.

She lay on her side, eyeing the wheelchair across the room and wondering if she should just drag her body out of bed and across the floor, get into the chair, and get her own self ready for once. Surely Shinichi would be surprised when he came home. He might be pleased to see that his wife was able to do _some_ things by herself. But what if instead it would make him upset to learn that she didn't necessarily need him for everything, especially after he had sacrificed _his_ everything to help her? And the more she thought about it, the more Shiho was convinced that this was really all a test he had devised for her, and that made her angry because she had always been the one that had confused him with her enigmatic actions.

And then she began to wonder if he had fed the dog.

Soon, lunchtime came… and went. Though Shiho had replaced that accursed hearing aid in her ear, she never heard the sound of the front door opening. A flicker of concern began to nag at her thoughts. If he knew he would miss lunch, he would have called to tell her. He had always done that before. _He should be home by now,_ she thought_, so why is he not?_ Soon, it became an anxious mantra in her head: _He should be home by now. He should be home by now. Why is he not? Why is he not? _

Her thoughts began to grow darker as the minutes continued to creep by. Perhaps several tough cases had arisen today and he was simply busy at the office, but perhaps… perhaps he _wasn't_ at the office… Perhaps… perhaps he was… at Ran's apartment… Perhaps he really _was_ having an affair with his old fiancée, knowing that his paralyzed wife would never be able to find out if he left her alone and in bed.

Perhaps. …So what if he _had_ really left her stranded in their bedroom on purpose? The only other reason she could think of for him doing such a thing was… if something had come up in a case… that had to do with… _them_.

Shiho suddenly pulled herself upright. If he really _had_ found out something about the remaining traces of the Organization, he should have known better than to try to hide it from her. When she had been Haibara Ai and he had been Edogawa Conan, he had never been able to keep her from learning about his investigations into the syndicate. The more she thought about it, the more that familiar sense of sinister foreboding began to wrap around her mind like a thick woolen blanket.

When the clock finally told her that Shinichi was an hour late, her patience snapped. Summoning all of her physical strength, she pulled herself off the bed and onto the ground. Her deadened legs hit the floor with a thump that would probably cause her to bruise, but of course she felt no pain and thus ignored it. It took less time than she imagined it would to make her way over to the wheelchair. Snapping the breaks in place, she realized she was at the hard part: getting into the chair from her position on the floor. As she pulled and jerked, she cursed Shinichi in several languages for getting her used to his assistance in this task. He had done that with everything, getting her more and more used to the peace and comfort of a normal life, and it had made her careless and had eventually put her and him and everyone into the miserable positions they were in now.

Somehow, after several attempts and failures, she made it onto the seat without tipping the wheelchair over. She sat for a long moment, breathing heavily with exertion and wondering for the umpteenth time why women had to have less upper body strength than men. Then, checking the clock across the room, she propelled herself towards the door, running over Shinichi's crumpled note in the process. She knew she needed to get some clothes on – not go wheeling about in her nightwear – but her stomach was in knots for lack of food and she still wasn't sure if Shinichi had fed the Papillion.

She spent the next hour or two in a bland, domestic mode, fixing lunch for both herself and Ai (Shinichi hadn't forgotten the dog's breakfast, fortunately) and straightening up some the rooms as best as she could. She hoped that neither Agasa-hakase nor the three teenagers would come by today to see her in her untidy state; fortunately, the doorbell never rang. Shinichi, however, failed to make an appearance as well. The whole time she busied herself with activity she had left her hearing aid turned up, listening for the key in the lock, though the prolonged silence caused it to begin buzzing obnoxiously.

When he was three hours late for lunch, Shiho began to feel the worry she had suppressed creep back up on her. He should have called, at the very least. Suddenly, in the middle of straightening a pillow on the couch, Shiho found herself smirking sadly. So, this was what Angel had gone through for so long, waiting for her Shinichi to come home to her, always waiting with one eye on the phone for his next infrequent call to arrive. How ironic. What was it about that man that always kept women so helplessly and hopelessly waiting for him?

The furry Papillion leaped onto her lap, breaking Shiho out of her reverie. She petted Ai, and the dog closed her eyes happily. The tag on the red collar jangled slightly, and Shiho turned her hand from Ai's fur to the tag. The kanji for "love" written there made her sigh hoarsely. She remembered when Shinichi had brought the dog home for her a year ago. It was because they could not have children, Shiho knew, though Shinichi had never said so. They could not have children because Shinichi could not bear to touch her in the first place.

Shiho tried reading with Ai curled tightly in her lap, but her thoughts could not stay on the chemical explanations and diagrams for long. So she decided to find a way to get dressed, for Shinichi would certainly tease her whenever he got home for going about the house in her nightgown. She felt dirty for not having washed first, but getting into the bathtub by herself was out of the question. She would certainly only hurt herself on the slippery porcelain if she tried, so she began to root through her clothing for something that seemed easy to get on, finally choosing a plain sweater and pants.

She wheeled herself over to the bed for her attempt. Lying on the mattress, she struggled to get on her underwear and pants, but everything else was easy once that was done. After struggling back onto the seat and resting for a moment, smug satisfaction filled her at her accomplishment. So he had thought to keep her in bed all day, had he? Well, she had showed him; though she was still a bit anxious, wondering if he would be upset at her newfound independence. Of course, how could he ever find out what she had accomplished if he never came home?

It was late afternoon when, again, she snapped, though this time it was her anxiety rather than her patience. She wheeled herself over to the telephone and picked it up, paused for a brief moment, then dialed the familiar number of the Beika district police department.

When she was finally connected to the correct office, a perky voice answered the phone. "Hello; this is Nara-keiji. Can I help you?"

Shiho's stared at her lap, deadpanning. Why couldn't someone she knew well, like Satou-san or Takagi-san, pick up the phone? Why did it have to be that new officer Shinichi had told her about, the one that had only been at the department about a month now? With an internal sigh, Shiho decided to answer anyway. "I need to speak to Kudo Shinichi, please."

"Uh…" Apparently, the officer was trying to figure out who exactly she was talking to. Shiho was sure that the rasp in her voice didn't help.

"I'm his wife. Kudo Shiho."

"Oh! Oh… yes, uh…" Nara sounded rather nervous, and suddenly Shiho wondered if she knew about her. "Yes, well… I'm sorry, but Kudo-tantei isn't here right now."

"Where he is now, then? …Was he even _there_ this morning?"

"Well, yes, he was definitely here this morning. But then he left with everyone else a few hours ago. …Well, everyone except me and a few others. Someone has to take the phone calls, you know!" Nara gave a dry, nervous laugh. Shiho rolled her eyes.

"Where did 'everyone else' go?"

"Um, well…" There was a pause, as if Nara was unsure that she should say. A moment later, though, there was a sound of shuffling papers. "I don't know much about this case myself, but… they left some information when they left. Darn it, if they catch me looking at these, they'll probably… Wait, here it is. …Well, it's not too far from here… I suppose they're staking out some warehouse…" Shiho felt her chest turn cold in dread.

"What were they going to do?"

"Well, from these papers I've got here, they've found some criminals or something that they've been tracking for a long time, and are going to try to catch them. …Again, I'm sorry, but I really don't know much. I mean, I am new here, and they all seem to know what they're talking about without really saying anything."

"Hmmm…" Shiho stared hard into space. Everything seemed to be supporting her worst fear. Shinichi had to have tracked down some of the last traces of the Organization, and now, he had taken a full force of officers out with him to finish the job. That had to be it. And suddenly, anger filled her being. How dare he keep this sort of thing from her!? Suddenly, however, she realized that Nara was asking if she was still on the line, so she murmured, "What?"

"Oh, well, I was just wondering… Would you like me to take a message for you? I can have Kudo-tantei call when he gets back."

"Tell me, where is this warehouse located?" There was a long pause. "…Now!"

"Okay!" Nara squeaked. Shiho sighed. She was fortunate that the officer seemed willing to obey her. Nara obviously knew that Kudo's mysterious wife did forensics work on the side and was technically a superior at the department. After another shuffling of papers, Nara hesitantly told her. Shiho felt her heart almost stop. _That was where… where Gin had…_ Shiho closed her eyes. _Oh, oneesan…_

"Kudo-san? …Ku- Kudo-san? Uh, are you-"

Shiho hung up the phone.

After making sure that Ai was sound asleep on her cushion, Shiho paused only for a moment in the foyer, listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock, before wheeling herself out the front door. In less than five minutes she was on the road, tightly clutching the steering wheel of the heavily modified vehicle. Shiho had insisted that Shinichi have his own normal car, one to drive to work or any other place without her, as the vehicle she was currently driving had been totally customized by Agasa-hakase to accommodate her handicap. The first time she had seen all of the modifications her adopted father had done for her, she had felt quite accepted.

Shiho's mind was blank of any distressing thoughts as she navigated through Tokyo's traffic. After several minutes, the motion of the vehicle started to make Shiho a bit sick; though Agasa-hakase had created the customizations to allow her to get around, it was rare that she actually went out. Pausing at an intersection, Shiho watched as other driver's eyes glanced over at her and notice the vehicles' customizations, perhaps in apprehension. Apparently, they didn't think a person in a wheelchair should be able to drive at all. She wondered what they would think if they knew the paralyzed woman was driving out to a dangerous police raid; probably that she was crazy. She wondered if they would be right.

Soon enough, Shiho steered the vehicle off of the main highway and onto a series of side streets. Suddenly, her anxiety reappeared and increased tenfold, sensing how near she was to the raid site. Why had Shinichi not told her? Why had he left her alone in the house? Her hands slowly clenched into fists. He hadn't even woken her up to tell her that he was going to work! _Why? _

She parked the vehicle next to one of the many police cars sitting in front of a giant fenced-in enclosure. Shiho stared past the fence at the rows and rows of foreboding warehouses. She felt a shudder pass over her at the horrible familiarity of the situation. The second she and her wheelchair were safely on the ground outside of the car, she wheeled herself stubbornly towards the entrance gate then into the compound.

As she passed the first row of warehouses, the sound of gunshots reached her ears. Shiho's heart almost stopped. "Hurry!" she hissed at herself, clutching the wheels tightly, eyes behind her glasses darting back and forth. Listening intensely, she tried to concentrate on figuring out which warehouse the shots were coming from.

The next gunshot was louder. Shiho eyed one warehouse looming at her on the right. The giant doors were partially opened.

"There!" As she approached the door, the pinging noise of a ricocheting bullet met her ears, followed by shouts of various volumes and intensities. She paused. The wounds at the base of her spine suddenly throbbed with a warning pain as they had right after her nightmare.

Panicking, Shiho just stared at the warehouse. "I didn't come out here to _almost_ get to him," she suddenly grumbled softly to herself and again began to wheel herself towards the opening. "I came to _get_ to my husband." The closer she came, the louder the yelling and the gunshots sounded, but somehow, it didn't make a difference anymore. After all, she thought, with her mind on her paralysis and other ailments, what more can they do to me?

With a grunt, she pulled at the wheels harder, but her muscles were already strained from the extra exertion of getting ready for the day, so each pull only had her gritting her teeth in pain. A little more, a little more, and then she would be at the entrance of the-

And suddenly, she stopped – or rather, the wheelchair stopped. Startled, she looked up to see what had prevented her from going through the door, only to realize that the _door_ was what was holding her back. With a grunt of effort, she pulled at the wheels again, but they were trapped between the two doors. The partial opening had not been wide enough for her to maneuver the wheelchair through.

In anger, frustration, and even humiliation, Shiho cursed in a raspy hiss, and slammed her hand against the chair's arm. Why? WHY? No matter how many armed Organization-copycats she had to go through, she didn't care; she only wanted to get to her husband, to find out why he had left her alone in bed, why he hadn't called her, why he hadn't come home, why he had sacrificed everything he had ever wanted to help her in the first place! Why, she thought, why? WHY?

A gunshot was suddenly ringing in her ears, and her head jerked up; the sound had been close. Apparently, the confrontation was gradually moving closer to the door, and closer to her in her trapped wheelchair. She could see the officers now – Megure, Satou, Takagi, Shiratori, Chiba, and the others – amongst a mix of black-cloaked figures as their fight carried them towards the exit.

And suddenly, there was a great cry of anguish, and Shiho's head whipped around to the floor in front of her. She knew that voice. Her heart plummeted.

There was Shinichi, kneeling on the ground, clutching his right hand with a pained expression on his face.

A handgun skidded on the floor and came to rest halfway between Shiho and Shinichi. She stared at it for a second, then at Shinichi, and then tried to look around for the man who had obviously just shot the gun out of Shinichi's now-bleeding hand, but the doors prevented her from getting any look at his opponent. Her eyes immediately turned back to Shinichi, only to widen as his horrified bright blue eyes pierced her own.

"DON'T MOVE!" a rough voice screamed, and all of the officers froze, as did Shinichi, his eyes darting back towards that man that was just beyond her range of sight. "IF ANY OF YOU SO MUCH AS MOVES A MUSCLE, I'LL BLOW HIM TO HELL!" From the looks on the police officers' faces, Shiho knew that the criminal was serious; all of their eyes immediately went to the detective on the floor, while his eyes remained locked on the one that was targeting him.

A long moment of dead silence fell upon the frozen scene, but Shiho didn't notice. The blood was pounding in her ears, and her knuckles were turning white from clutching the arms of the wheelchair. She had thought that there was nothing more that they, those who continued to commit crimes in the name of the Black Organization, could do to her. She had been wrong. There was so much more they could still do to her, and it was so much more painful, more painful than her ears or her eyes or her throat or her paralyzed legs. They could take _him_ away from her. And that would be all it would take to bring her down permanently, to plunge her into that bottomless pit of darkness forever more.

She couldn't look at him anymore. She couldn't look at him, kneeling on the ground, blood flowing freely from his wounded hand. She just couldn't.

So she closed her eyes.

_Oh, Akemi,_ she thought, and the thought turned into a desperate prayer. _Oh, oneesan, what can I do? I'm too useless to do anything for him, and now he is going to die. I'm of no use to him, so why did he do all of those things for me? Why?! Oh, sister… please… help me to do something… anything… I have to protect him… Help me… Help me… to be useful for once… Just one time, help me to give something back to him… Perhaps wings, oneesan… If you could give me wings to get up out of this chair… Give me the strength to get to him, and save him from Death… Please oneesan…_

She could see it in her mind, like a hazy dream.

The muscles under her shoulder blades would tense, and then her entire torso would tense, summoning strength that came from far beyond her own mortal body – from her sister looking down on her from wherever Akemi's soul was residing. And suddenly, the muscles of her dead legs would tense, and she would feel a faint stirring in her legs, the first time in four years. That faint stirring would be enough, though, to force her leg muscles to prepare to spring.

Then her body would launch itself out of that blasted wheelchair, frightening the police officers who were looking on and even herself. At first, she would stumble, not sure if the stirring was going to give her enough power to stand, but she would stay upright and take her first step in a long, long time. It would feel strange to have all of her weight centered on such small places as the soles of her feet, but after the next few steps, walking would become natural all over again.

But she would not walk for long. She did not have time to move slowly, for as she passed the doorframe, the criminal whose gun was trained on Shinichi would now be able to see her and would turn his eyes to her in shock. She would not be afraid, however, because she wouldn't have time to think about fear. Instead, she would propel herself forward, her eyes darting back and forth from the gunman to Shinichi to the handgun lying on the ground. Out of the corner of her eyes, she would see Shinichi turn his head to look at her, but she wouldn't have time to meet his astonished gaze.

As she closed in on the gun lying on the ground, she would begin to bend over, and even though she would think that this action might send her tumbling to the floor, her revived feet would be moving too fast for her to fall. She would scoop up the gun as she came upon it and would see the gunman turning his gun towards her, and she would be glad because it was away from Shinichi. She would not, however, allow herself to be shot, never again, not after it had taken her four years to move her legs after her last bullet wounds.

Instead, she would straighten up, never stopping, and would turn the gun in her hands towards the gunman. The feeling of the cold metal in her hand would be as familiar as walking, and her hands would unconsciously go through the motions of preparing the gun to fire.

And then, she would pull the trigger before the gunman across the room even had time to think about putting his finger to his own gun's trigger. The vibration of the blast would set her arms trembling, but she would clutch the gun tighter in her hands. The cry that would come from the gunman, as his weapon dropped out of his newly damaged hand, would send a shiver down her spine that would make its way all of the way down her tingling legs to her toes.

This shiver would make her knees buckle, even as her feet would continue to carry her forward towards Shinichi. Almost to her husband, the strength from her sister would falter and her buckling knees would get the best of her. She would stumble and then fall towards the ground, releasing the gun to catch herself with her hands. Shinichi would be right there, though, to catch her and she would fall face-first into his arms. She would bury her nose into his neck as they both collapsed on the ground in a heap, and his warm arms would suddenly be around her, pulling her close. And he would begin to cry out, and at first Shiho would think it was in distress, before realizing he was crying out in happiness.

She could see it all in her mind, like a hazy dream.

She opened her eyes.

"SHIHO! SHIHO!" Shinichi's loud voice pierced her ears; for a second, she panicked. If he was trying to get her to move the wheelchair out of the doorway and get away, she wouldn't be able to do it; she was stuck.

But then, she blinked. His voice didn't sound upset. In fact, it sounded… joyful, and… awfully close by.

She glanced up, dazed, and found herself staring right into his wide, bright blue eyes.

"Oh, Shiho, where did you…? How did you get…? And how… how did you…?" Shinichi was at a loss, and he suddenly pulled her closer. Shiho's lips parted in shock, and she turned her head to the side, her glasses askew, as he pressed her tightly to his chest.

There was the doorway across the room, and in the doorway sat her empty wheelchair.

"…No…" she managed to rasp out disbelievingly. A blast of sound suddenly met her ears. Cries of delight, pounding footsteps; the police officers were cheering as they ran towards the pair on the ground.

"Yes! Yes!" Shinichi cried, pulling back so he could see her stunned face. Blinking, she recognized the vibration in her hands that the gun's shot had left behind, and… and…

"My… legs… I can… They feel… fuzzy…" she whispered. A sharp sting zipped across her legs and she watched – felt – them twitch.

"I knew…! I knew… someday that…! Oh, Shiho!" His warm hands were suddenly cupping her cheeks, and even though his right hand was bleeding all over her from its bullet wound, she couldn't think of one sarcastic thing to say. Her stomach was churning, but it had less to do with the dizziness that had come over her than with the sensations Shinichi's touch was filling her with.

And suddenly his lips pressed against hers. Immediately, she kissed him back, her arms encircling his neck desperately. For a long moment, they stayed still in that embrace until Shinichi pulled his lips away so he could hug her closer to his body.

"Oh, Shiho…" he murmured, and one of his warm hands began to stroke her back. "Why… why did you come all of the way out here…?"

She didn't know what to say at first, but finally found her voice, though it came out quiet and raspy. "I… I needed to ask you why… Why did you… leave without waking me up this morning…? I was so… concerned that-"

"That's why I didn't," he whispered back. "I didn't want you to worry about me, because I was going after the Organization again."

"Stupid," she muttered, burying her nose in his neck. "Stupid, stupid idiot. You should know better than to try to keep these things from me."

He sighed softly. "You're right about that." Then, quietly, she heard him murmur the one thing she really wanted to hear.

With a playful smirk twitching onto her face, she turned her head towards the doorway once more. Beyond the wheelchair, high in the sky, a ray of brilliant sunshine was pouring out from behind the sky's dark clouds. Her smirk slowly softened into a small smile.

"I love you, too."


	6. Submerge

**Fandom: **Detective Conan

**Title: **Submerge

**Author: **Eeveebeth Fejvu

**Theme: **#12 – Your love is suffocating me

**Pairing/Characters: **Kudo Shinichi and Haibara Ai

**Rating: **K+

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Detective Conan_. I requested Haibara to make me a pill that would somehow turn me into the creator of the shrunken tantei-san, but my order is in line behind the antidote to Apoptoxin-4869. …So, for now, I write fan fiction.

**Summary:** "Get this off of me," Ai commands seriously. Shinichi's grin widens.

**Author's Note: **Inspired by opening theme #20, "Namida no Yesterday," by Garnet Crow.

* * *

In her dark dreams, she is being pinned and crushed to the ground by Gin's boot, which is grinding mercilessly into her chest. She screams for help, for Kudo, for someone to save her. The dark alley is a surreal swirl around her though, so even as her screams weaken, she knows that this situation is temporary because this is just another nightmare. In her mind she remains calm, waiting to surface from these murky depths to catch a breath of reality, and soon enough, she is aware that she is awake with her eyes still closed.

Ai sighs softly, wondering when the old paranoia will cease to disrupt her sleep. Then she realizes that what she mistook as Gin's weight remains pressing heavily and warmly on her chest. Not only that, but her arms are pinned to her sides and her legs are pressed together. Her muscles tense automatically to fight or fly, the old habit revived by the dream. She forces her body to relax and her breath to remain steady. No need to panic just yet.

She opens both eyes slowly to find herself gazing into black-filmed glass. Reality descends upon her mind once more as she remembers where she must have dozed off. Beyond her sunglasses, she can see the rim of the beach umbrella and a sky blanketed in fluffy clouds above her. It must be late afternoon, she guesses, though the glasses are dark enough to make it seem like night. The smell of salt water invades her nose, and the cries of gulls and the crashing of the waves on the shore invades her ears. The blanket she is lying on is warm and comfortable, but the weight crushing the rest of her body is not; it is scratchy, rough, and suffocating, leaving her perplexed.

Presently, she recognizes the noise of a plastic scoop digging into the sand nearby and the slosh of sand as it is poured into a pile. Ai also identifies the not-quite-repressed chuckle that belongs to the detective she called out for in her nightmare. She becomes placidly curious and retains her façade of sleep in order to listen.

She hears the young, girlish giggle that belongs to Ayumi. "Shinichi-niisan! …What are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" he replies. From his tone, she can tell he is grinning.

"Well, that's not very nice!" Ayumi does not sound serious, or even admonishing for that matter.

Ai hears a bit of apprehension in Mitsuhiko's voice, however. "Haibara-san will not like this when she wakes up."

Another scooping and sloshing noise follows. "…That's okay," Shinichi responds finally.

She hears footsteps in the shifting sand and labored breathing. "Here's the water," Genta says through his panting, and she hears a _thunk_ – a child's plastic pail is set down.

"Thanks!" Another scooping noise is followed by a _plunk_ as sand hits the water in the pail. Ayumi giggles again and Mitsuhiko makes a sound as if he is trying to stifle his amusement.

As the scooping and plunking sounds continue, Ai hears the sand shift again as someone else approaches. "Oi, Kudo!"

"What is it, Hattori?" Shinichi suddenly sounds rather exasperated.

"Kazuha and 'Neechan are playing volleyball right now."

"I know."

"…Well, doncha wanna play, too? We can do guys against girls, or-"

"Maybe later, Hattori." Scoop, _plunk_. Scoop, _plunk_.

"…Ya know, 'Neechan said-"

"I'll pass."

"Jeez… fine, Kudo. …Kudo, what are ya doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" he replies coolly. Ayumi giggles. "Wait… okay, here we go." A moment later, the weight on Ai's chest abruptly intensifies as a pail-shaped mound of wet sand is upended on top of the heap of sand already encasing her body. "There! Almost finished. …Do you have it still, Mitsuhiko-kun?"

"Yep!" The boy replies. Ai hears his feet kicking up sand as he rushes off. Shinichi chuckles.

"Will she really appreciate that, Kudo?" Hattori suddenly asks, a wary tinge to his voice.

"It's only sand, Hattori, so I doubt-"

"I meant 'Neechan. …Do ya think she will really appreciate ya running off every time ya-"

"Later. I'm busy."

"…Okay, then, Kudo." Hattori sounds disappointed, and Ai doesn't blame him. She wonders why Kudo is not playing volleyball with the rest of them right now, wonders why he is hanging out with the children instead.

"Here it is!" Mitsuhiko shouts as he returns. Ayumi giggles again. Hattori snorts in disbelief. Suspicious, Ai forgets to pretend she is asleep. She lifts her head the slightest bit, trying to catch a glimpse of something more than the umbrella.

Shinichi catches her movement immediately. "And she finally awakens!" he exclaims dramatically. Ai is glad that her eyes are hidden behind her sunglasses because they are suddenly wide with surprise. Kudo Shinichi has built an entire sandcastle right on top of her as she slept. Grinning, he places one of the tiny red flags from the children's lunches on top of the newest, central turret. "Ta da! …What do you think,Haibara-san?"

Ai thinks that he has gone crazy but she doesn't say it aloud. The children all giggle nervously. Standing there proudly in his ridiculously patterned swim shorts, Shinichi continues to grin, waiting for her reaction. Finally, she speaks.

"I hate you."

The children erupt into hysterical laughter. Shinichi's expression doesn't change. His eyes meet hers even through the dark sunglass lenses, and his penetrating stare frustrates her. She wonders what he hopes to accomplish with this nonsense.

"Come on, Haibara-san. Don't be that way. Everyone knows that if you fall asleep at the beach, you're going to get buried in sand." Perhaps the summer season has brought out this childish side of his, she thinks. Perhaps it is because they are at the beach. Perhaps he has simply been around the kids too long. Perhaps he had simply _been _a kid too long.

"Get this off of me," Ai commands seriously.

Shinichi's grin widens, and he gets up, coming closer to lean down over her face. She thinks he is about to say something, but instead, his hands reach out to pluck the sunglasses off of her face. Immediately she screws her eyes up against the sunlight in vain; it seeps in through her eyelids anyway. Though unable to see him, she knows that he is still grinning as he cheekily replies, "No."

Annoyed at how her nap was interrupted, Ai opens her eyes slightly and, squinting, attempts to jerk against her heavy, sandy bindings. The children shriek in playful fear at her movement and back several paces away, ready to run should she escape. Shinichi backs up as well, though he remains calm. He holds the sunglasses up by one end and waves them, taunting her with his action and his grin. Hattori stares at Shinichi dubiously.

Ai jerks harder, trying to pull her legs up to kick against the sand. The walls of her prison are crumbling faster than the top, so her right hand is the first to break free. The children shriek excitedly again. Ai jerks her entire arm out, causing a mini landslide of sand, and begins to push away the mound on top of her chest. The newest turret falls away in damp clumps, burying the red flag in the ground. As the weight on her chest lessens, she takes a deep breath, secretly relieved that she no longer feels suffocated. With renewed energy, she gives a mighty heave, freeing herself from most of the castle's remains.

Now the children do run, hands waving wildly in the air as they flee from the scene. What they think she will do to them Ai isn't sure. Shinichi backs further away, signaling to Hattori that he would be wise to do the same. Hattori's expression abruptly becomes apprehensive. He backs up, keeping his eyes on the strawberry blonde girl, until he turns around to head back up the beach toward the volleyball net. Ai manages to roll over onto her side, then quickly gets to her feet, grainy particles scattering everywhere.

She doesn't bother with shaking the sand off of her beach towel because she is more interested in retrieving her sunglasses first, even though her eyes are quickly becoming used to the late afternoon sunlight. She doesn't even bother brushing off the sand that stuck to the lotion on her arms and legs. With deliberate, even steps, she stalks imperiously towards Shinichi, who is backing up at the same pace towards the lapping waves behind him. The grin is still there on his face, but it is softer now, more personal and less for show now that Hattori and the children have run off and left them alone. He stops as the very edge of the beach, water gently swirling around his feet as the waves roll in.

Finally gaining ground on him, Ai stops several feet away, not returning his grin. "Give them back." She holds out her hand for her sunglasses.

"You don't need them," he replies, smiling unyieldingly, "The sun is getting ready to set." Ai remains steadfast, holding her hand out sternly. The standoff lasts for a very long moment. The shouting of the children can be heard in the distance. A pair of gulls calls joyously overhead, scouting for beachgoers willing to toss them food.

Suddenly uneasy at what is transpiring, Ai feels forced to break the silence. "Why aren't you playing volleyball with them… with her?"

The grin fades slightly. Shinichi sighs, then stares at her solemnly for a moment. "They're dolphins," he replies.

She looks at him blankly until she remembers what she once said to him on another beach, another day. It seems like a lifetime ago now. "We've already had this conversation before," she states.

"No, _you _told me these things, and now I'm telling you." Casually, he opens up her glasses and stores them securely on top of his head in his damp hair, sweeping his bangs away from his forehead.

"What is it, then?" she asks impatiently. She wants to get back to her beach towel.

He hesitates for a moment, as if trying to find the right words. "…Even if dolphins are sweet and gentle, they are predictable… so sometimes it's not as fun as playing with sharks, which always surprise you." Ai stares at the young man, incredulous. He continues knowingly, "Sometimes sharks will ignore you, and sometimes they will bite you, but time spent with sharks is never dull."

Her face loses its surprise. Knowing that he is not going to give the sunglasses back now, Ai turns her back on him and begins to trudge up the beach, sand rising between her toes with each step. "I thought you decided you weren't going to run away anymore," he yells at her back, his voice sounding almost desperate, almost accusatory.

She does not stop or turn her head, but calls back to him as she goes. "I'm _not_ running away from dolphins anymore." This is true. She is here after all, right? She came on this trip to the beach, didn't she?

"You shouldn't run away from detectives, either," he retorts. She shakes her head at his comment, eyes staring down at her feet as she walks. "You know why?" She ignores him. "Because detectives will always… CATCH YOU!"

Ai gives an involuntary cry as large hands grab her around the middle and pull her up off the sand. He had come up so fast behind her with those long teenage legs of his that she hadn't even had a chance to glance back. She flails in the air for a moment, his firm grasp being her only support, until she finds herself flipped around and held to his chest. Instinctually, her small hands reach for safety and she wraps her arms around his neck, her heart beating wildly in surprise.

"See? What did I tell you?" He turns around and starts to head back to the edge of the ocean. "You can never escape a good detective." Ai doesn't know what to say. She is silent, staring wide-eyed over his right shoulder at the protective beach umbrella that is growing more distant with every jolting step he takes.

She hears the smack of his feet on the water's surface as he takes the first steps into the surf. After that, his steps morph into a slow, effortful shuffle as the dense saltwater rises up his calves to his knees. Her arms tighten around his neck, though he is carrying her quite securely. His right arm is wrapped around her legs, his left hand on her back, pressing her solidly against him.

Ai tries to avoid thinking about the fact that his naked chest is warm from the sun and is slick with sweat and saltwater, because such a combination stirs up a feeling that she has always tried to repress around him. She is unable to avoid the thought, however; his bare skin is under her tiny fingertips, and her face is so close to his body that the scent of his suntan lotion lingers in her nose. After a moment, she thinks she can feel his heartbeat against her chest, but she is unsure since that would mean that his heart is beating at the same frantic pace as hers.

The tips of her toes suddenly touch water, and she removes her chin from his shoulder in order to look down. He is up to his waist in the surf and his shuffling steps are not coming to a halt. When she chances a glance at his carefully-schooled expression, she is cautious, because she knows that if she isn't, her slightly parted lips will brush his warm neck. She does not want to send the wrong message, though the ones he is sending her have left her in quite a disoriented state.

She resignedly rests against his shoulder once more. His hold on her has not relaxed nor given her a chance to break free. Even if she could, she isn't sure that she would be able to make it back to shore without his help. The further into the ocean he walks, the higher the water level that surrounds her, and now she can feel the surf on the back of her thighs. Moments later, the water is creeping past her waist.

Soon she takes her chin away again to stare down at the ocean's surface, this time with more apprehension. They are now up to the middle of his chest in the water, and the pressure of the brine combined with the pressure of his embrace is starting to make her feel suffocated again. Perhaps he feels her grip tighten, because he finally comes to a halt. A low wave rolls over them, bringing the water level temporarily up to her shoulder blades. Then it passes by.

"What is it?" he asks. She slowly and cautiously looks up at his face. He is staring at her out of the corner of his eye. At first, she thinks he is referring to her hold on him, and then wonders if some of her anxiety is showing on her face.

He doesn't give her a chance to respond. "You should know by now that I won't let you drown," he says, then more directly, "in the water… or in anything else."

A large wave crashes into them unexpectedly; both had been too distracted to notice its approach. While it passes over her head, she is completely submerged, caged by the forceful surf. She is somehow calm, though, even more so than she was in her nightmare because she knows that she will be able to catch her breath in just a moment… and this time, she is not alone.

And the wave moves on, leaving the little girl and the young man to spit out salt and shake the excess water from their hair. As their coughing subsides, Shinichi gives her a sheepish grin, knowing that his carefully planned zeugma has been ruined by the unforeseen event.

Ai stares past his shoulder, however, as the offending wave breaks on the shore. "I'm not unhappy," she says. Shinichi's expression falters before he realizes that she has, in her own way, answered his question.

"Sure…" His reply is dripping with sarcasm. She ignores it. Her eyes have locked back onto the umbrella and towel on the sandy beach.

Once more, the prolonged silence that follows his comment is punctuated by a gull's call overhead. This gull is alone, and its solitary cry seems filled with anguish. Ai wonders why it mourns.

"I just want you to know," Shinichi says suddenly, his voice wavering slightly, "that… that spending time with sharks is something that I… that I _choose_ to do. I choose to do it because… I want to."

Ai feels that she is slipping down his sweat-and-lotion-soaked chest, so she struggles to get a better grip around his neck. Immediately his grip on her tightens to prevent her from fall out of his grasp, causing her to abruptly exhale. Before she can regain her breath, his lips are at her ear, whispering, "I just want you to know that I'm not running away from you either."

She can no longer look him in the eye. Instead, she stares down at the water. "…You didn't have to bury me in sand to make me stay."

Shinichi laughs at her huffy tone. "Is that so?" Ai doesn't remind him that she didn't leave.

Finally, she sighs and asks, "Why did you bring me out here?"

"… Because I wanted to watch the sunset with you."

Immediately she lifts her sight to the horizon. The magnificent setting sun is streaked with brilliant crimson, rose, and gold, and the colors are so intense that the fiery orb almost seems alive. It is a sunset more beautiful than any she can remember. Out of the corner of her eye, she peers at Shinichi's tenderly smiling face, which is even more attractive than the sunset.

She remembers the miserable nightmare of Gin crushing her to the concrete, forcing the air out of her lungs. And she pushes it aside. Though Shinichi's arms are suffocating her, she has never felt more alive.

He has always been able to take her breath away.


	7. Adagio Sostenuto

**Fandom: **Detective Conan

**Title: **_Adagio Sostenuto_

**Author: **Eeveebeth Fejvu

**Theme: **#18 – Listen to the music at night

**Pairing/Characters: **Edogawa Conan and Haibara Ai

**Rating: **K

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Detective Conan_. I requested Haibara to make me a pill that would somehow turn me into the creator of the shrunken tantei-san, but my order is in line behind the antidote to Apoptoxin-4869. …So, for now, I write fan fiction.

**Summary:** The melody is soothing and gentle, but so mysterious and evocative…

**Author's Note: **Inspired by the well-known manga files 7.2-7, with additional inspiration from the little-known anime episode 81 (episode number taken from the English DVD).

* * *

Conan awakens instantly with a gasp of fear. His eyes are wide open and his fingers dig into the sheets that have twisted themselves around his small frame. He freezes in place, listening intently. The vast Kudo mansion is silent now, but he knows he heard it, the softly climbing scales of Beethoven's great composition. The melody is soothing and gentle, like a child's lullaby, but so mysterious and evocative that even in his sleep the distinctive sound of the lone piano puts him on edge. From the very first notes, a blazing fire erupted in front of his eyes, the heat rolling in scorching waves onto his unprotected face, the muffling smoke clogging his burning throat. Missing, however, were the violent crackle of the inferno and the wailing of the sirens; all was silent in that flaming vortex, silent except for that haunting, wordless song.

As he lies motionless in his old bed – Shinichi's bed – and listens for more of the music in the dark, Conan wonders at the sheer power of that memory. He has always heard that scent has the greatest tie to old, half-forgotten remembrances, but perhaps in his case it is sound. When he continues to contemplate on the matter, he begins to realize that some of the clearest things he can remember about his cases are the ticking of the bombs, the cocking of the triggers, the screeching of tires, the sobbing of cornered suspects. He blinks, gazing up at the dark ceiling. The sobbing of a small girl, heartbroken and clinging to his shirt, both blaming him and begging him for forgiveness.

The faint melody begins again. Carefully, he untangles himself from his sheets, kicking them away with his bare toes. He reaches instinctively towards the nightstand for his glasses, hesitates briefly, and puts them on anyway, sliding off the mattress and into his house scuffs. He pads softly out of the bedroom and down the hallway, following the slow, drawn out tune as it drifts through the quiet mansion. Finally, he arrives at the paneled wood door he sought and pushes it open with both hands.

In the dark room, the sheer curtains covering the French doors are thrown back, allowing pale white moonlight to flow in and fall upon the black grand piano majestically isolated in the middle of the wood floor. Perched gracefully on the piano bench, the petite figure he expected to find is there, playing on without turning around to look at him. Conan leans against the doorway as he watches her. In the full moon's shining glow, her reddish brown hair is almost silver, and from the short glimpses he gets, her delicate fingers strike each ivory key with quiet assurance. To him, she is beautiful beyond words.

Softly, Conan makes his way across the open floor. Halfway there, she seems to sense his presence, her hands suspended in midair as the last notes fade away. She rests them gently on the keyboard as he comes to stand next to the bench.

"You woke me up," he tells her impassively.

"Sorry," Ai replies in kind. Her eyes are fixed on the faded and wrinkled sheet music in front of her.

After a comfortable pause, Conan feels the hint of a smile twitch onto his face. "That song gave me a nightmare."

Finally she turns her head to look at him, raising a thin eyebrow in question. "'Moonlight' Sonata?"

"Mmhmm." When he doesn't elaborate, her inquisitive expression darkens. Conan overlooks the adorable coldness in her luminous eyes and teases her gently with a grin. "There was once a case…"

Her expression grows tedious, certain that she knows where this is going.

"There was once a case…" he continues anyway, "four or five years ago, I guess, one of my first ones as Conan… where death occurred on this island whenever that song was played. It began many years before with a famous pianist named Asou Keiji…"

As he continues to outline the case and the suspects, he watches the dullness in her expression transition into aloof interest. It makes all the difference to him that she does not break into his story with a snide comment or grow irritated at his discourse.

As he finally comes to the denouement, however, he finds it harder to go on. His speech becomes disjointed and he pauses more often as the images, as brilliant as fresh photographs, flash into his mind. Finally, his words cease. All he can see is the fire raging around him, consuming the building, the piano, the countless pages of sheet music… All he can hear is that terrifying, lingering scale…

"…Conan?" He blinks as her soft voice snaps him out of his unwanted reverie. She is not looking at him unkindly, but with firmness. "What happened? …Asou Seiji confessed to you, and then…? You said that the place was burning down around you…"

He is silent. He wants to finish the distressing tale, wants to let her in. And the longer he hesitates, the more he fears her patience will snap. If it does, he is sure that he will never be able to go on.

He finally opens his mouth, but the words refuse to leave his lips.

"You can tell me." There is no impatience in her hushed voice, only calm sincerity.

The quiet remark strikes a familiar chord within him. It is the same sort of voice he has employed around her, the same gentle tone he has tried his best to use when prodding her to continue a story, for the past few years.

Once he had realized how truly difficult it was for her to share her memories with him – despite knowing of his profound affection for her – he had made a conscious effort to approach the often disturbing and traumatizing subject of her past with a calmness and sympathy that did not always come naturally to him. Sometimes it would take hours for her to relate the smallest incident about her former life, so deep was the scarring in her soul, but it was always worth the time. And, over the years, Conan had noticed a sure increase in her openness and honesty with him, growing to a point where he became convinced that no one had ever known or could ever know Haibara Ai the way he did.

"You can tell me," she repeats, still tranquil and still genuine. Her eyes narrow as she focuses on his slightly uncertain expression. "Whatever happened… I will understand."

Conan willfully forces the words to rush out of his mouth. "He threw me out the window." Her eyebrows rise in surprise. "He picked me up and… he threw me out of the window. The glass just shattered… into a million pieces… and the next thing I knew, I had hit the concrete outside."

He remembers the sound of the glass shattering more than the pain of the impact, and he realizes that his hands have curled up into fists. His entire body is shaking uncontrollably.

He suddenly gasps. "…I was so small, and there was nothing I could do… I tried to get him to leave, but he… _He died! _He died, Ai! Just like that!He died in that building… playing the piano, and I… I watched it burn. …He said that there was blood staining his hands, and that he… He just let himself be burnt right up…"

Ashamed, Conan buries his face in his trembling hands. He doesn't trust himself to speak calmly, and Ai does not respond, so for a long moment the mansion remains silent. Finally, he lifts his head up enough to catch a glimpse of her expression in the silvery moonlight. Her face has grown grave and drawn, but she does not turn away from him. He realizes she is still giving him time to go on, so he continues, not sure exactly where he is going.

"I felt… I had never felt so much… like a failurein my entire life. I mean… I was right there, and I could have stopped him. Even now, I still wonder … if only I had said something different… if only I had been Shinichi instead of Conan… would he have lived?"

He pauses to consider his own words for a moment. "…Once, during a case we solved together, Hattori and I prevented the suspect from killing herself, but she was in such a turmoil afterward that Hattori… suggested that maybe it would have been better – more humane – if we had let her carry it out."

A tense, hoarse laugh escapes him. "It immediately made me think of Seiji… he had planned his own death as well, right from the very start, and I had been too caught up in solving the case to even consider that… he might resort to measures like… And so I told Hattori, 'If you corner a killer with your deductions, and then let that killer commit suicide… you're no better than a murderer yourself.'

"And, truthfully, it doesn't even matter if they are the ones that kill themselves… If a suspect dies on your watch… it's the same…"

He sees her stiffen slightly at his words, her back straighten and her eyes narrow. He forgets his own grief for a moment as he tries to figure out what he said to cause this barely perceptible action. And, looking into her intelligent face, he recognizes the connection she immediately made between the death of Asou Seiji and the death of another much dearer to her heart.

"You… weren't the only one that blamed me for your sister's death…" he finally murmurs, lips twitching into a small, uncomfortable smile.

She stares at him for a long silent moment, her intense expression frozen in place. He understands that she is trying to sort out her own emotions and thoughts, and he finds himself practically holding his breath.

He is awaiting judgment, he realizes, just as she had waited for his own every time she revealed some dark secret or criminal activity she had been involved in during her years in the Black Organization. And he has been waiting for her final judgment on this most personal of failures for years, ever since she had dropped to her knees before him that first day they had met. He finds himself hoping that she will be as merciful as he had come to be. The charge on him now is not unlike those that he had once pressed against her, before he had learned how to care for her.

Finally, she speaks, in a subdued but honest voice.

"I don't blame you."

And that is all she says as she turns her attention back to the worn sheet music perched on the piano's stand. As if on impulse, she suddenly reaches a delicate hand out to the already tidy pages to straighten them, then turns back to the first page of the composition.

Conan is, most of all, relieved. He stands quietly, letting out the breath he had been holding in, then gazes over her head and through the doors' clear glass panes at the shining full moon in the sky. Sincerely, he whispers, "Thank you."

After a moment, her silver-lit hair bobs slightly as she gives a short nod. Then, eyes still focused on the musical score in front of her, she scoots slightly to one side of her seat, leaving just enough room for another.

Warily, he accepts the invitation and joins her on the piano bench. To prevent himself from fallen off the small perch, he presses his left side snuggly against her right, and she silently adjusts her trapped arm, placing her elegant, arched fingers back on the ivory keys. When he is finally still, she resumes her performance, but from the beginning of the first movement.

After the first dozen measures, he slowly leans his head to the side to rest his cheek on her shoulder. The position is not entirely comfortable, because her delicate shoulder is relatively bony and his glasses' frame presses painfully into him, but she is warm and her long, lace-trimmed cotton nightgown is soft against his skin.

"You must understand…" he closes his eyes and speaks quietly over the lingering notes, "why I couldn't let you die… not on that hijacked bus… not in the twin towers… not any place or any time, no matter how close the Organization seemed to be to finding us…" Silky strands of her hair tickle his face, but he doesn't brush them away. He chuckles softly. "Of course, that wasn't the only reason… just the only one that I understood at the time…"

For a moment, there is an unusual pause in the melody, and he opens his eyes, thinking that she is stopping once more, but the moment passes and she continues to play. Watching her progression through the measures, he reaches out to turn the page as she gets to the end of the last line. As he does, his eyes flicker up to the top of the sheet at the first movement's description.

_Adagio Sostenuto. _He barely gets the page turned in time for her to carry on without interruption. _Adagio_, an unhurried and regal tempo, and _Sostenuto_,holding each note out longer than is typical. He considers the musical notations even with the words gone from his sight. Together, they signal a slow and sustained melody, dilatory and lingering. The idea seems familiar, and he gradually understands why.

He and Ai are just like the 'Moonlight' Sonata. Their entire relationship, from its admittedly rocky beginning to its present openness and honest affection, has been slow to progress, each new stage of interaction sustained for months, even years, at a time. Every exposed secret and every fault forgiven has helped them, however, to climb the scale until their trust in each other is as beautiful as the Sonata itself.

As her fingers continue to navigate the keyboard with precision, Conan lets the melody fill his ears and his mind, finally savoring the composition as he has not been able to do in years. He smiles, certain now that the slow, sustained piece will no longer haunt his conscience or his dreams.


	8. The Girlfriend

**Fandom: **Detective Conan

**Title: **The Girlfriend

**Author: **Eeveebeth Fejvu

**Theme: **#10 – Together _itsumo_ (Together always)

**Pairing/Characters: **Kudo Shinichi and Miyano Shiho

**Rating:** K

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Detective Conan_. I asked Haibara to make me a pill that would somehow turn me into the creator of the shrunken detective, but my order is in line behind the antidote to Apoptoxin-4869. So, for now, I write fan fiction. (Also, I do not own any characters from any other various fandoms that readers may believe have snuck into this particular tale.)

**Summary:** Always being with one's boyfriend was part of what girlfriends did.

* * *

Nervously prodding the fancy marinated chicken on her plate with a silver fork, Ran listened desperately for some snippet of conversation that she could understand in hopes that she might have something to contribute. Already feeling out of place, the stupefied silence she had been forced into by the surrounding dialogue was making her uneasy. She had lost her appetite because of it, despite how delicious the extravagant Western cuisine smelled. Her shoulders slumped, causing the poufy red sleeves of her dress to slide a few more centimeters down her arms. She longed to have the chance to say _something_, no matter how ordinary or mundane, but so far the chance to do so had not yet presented itself.

Ran had always been rather proud of herself when it came to attending these extravagant social functions. Despite her middle class upbringing, she rarely felt inferior to the famous and wealthy people who hosted and attended these galas. After all, she was usually escorted by her famous detective father or her wealthy best friend, and often enough these events were sponsored by one of her father's clients or the Suzuki family itself. With all of her experience aboard private yachts and in luxury hotel ballrooms, she also felt secure in her ability to use the correct manners, speak at the politest level, and to wear the most appropriate attire.

Right now, however, she was seriously wondering if her confidence was unfounded.

The prominent people at this particular get-together were not quite the same sort of diamond-and-pearl-appareled group of movie stars, business leaders, and socialites that Ran was used to mingling with. This international gathering (apparently the first held in Japan by a sponsor that Ran couldn't pronounce) was attended only by the world's _intellectual_ elite, the very finest and brightest in their fields of science and logic. There were experts in biology and chemistry, specialists in physics, and gifted mathematicians, as well as up-and-coming engineers, geniuses in the latest technology, and – of course – famous great detectives.

Having no great interest in (or, she would awkwardly admit, aptitude in) these academic fields, Ran was at the gathering as the date – the honest-to-goodness romantic _date!_ – of Japan's modern-day Sherlock Holmes, Kudo Shinichi. His formal invitation had specified that he was allowed to bring one guest, and he had asked her on the spot. Naturally, she had said yes, for she was – _officially_ – his girlfriend, and always being with one's boyfriend was part of what girlfriends did. (Her father had begged to differ on this point, of course, seeing as the party was expected to last well into the night. In the end, however, she had not been forbidden from going, as her disheveled father was spending most of his time trying to figure out why he, the illustrious "Sleeping Kogoro," hadn't received his own invitation. )

Ran lifted her eyes from her full plate to consider her sharply-dressed date, who was halfway through his own dinner despite the long, animated discussion – in fluent English! – that he was having with a short, blond German man sitting across the table from them. Ran sighed, but Shinichi didn't seem to notice, inadvertently ignoring her in his eager communion with his fellow academics.

Her boyfriend was not the only person she knew that had been invited, but knowing this only made Ran feel even more left out. After all, Heiji had also been invited, but at the last minute was forced to decline after walking into an intriguing murder case in Osaka. (If only he had come, Kazuha surely would have been his guest, and Ran would have had someone to talk to!)

Agasa-hakase had obtained an invite as well, for some scientific discoveries made during the creation of his more successful inventions. He was currently sitting across the convention room with a group of Chinese technology buffs fascinated by his homing glasses.

And for her "groundbreaking work in biochemistry," Miyano Shiho had been invited as well. Earlier that evening, Ran had suddenly wondered just how much this gala's hosts really _knew_ about Shiho's discoveries, especially the anomalistic effects of her apoptoxin and the illegality of the poison's commissioners. Ran had considered that, perhaps, the ethics were not as important as the final product to them, or maybe they had invited her for some less controversial achievement that Ran wasn't aware of. Even if she wanted to, though, she couldn't discreetly ask the other woman now, for Ran was sitting to Shinichi's immediate right while Shiho had seated herself on his left, thus making casual conversation impossible.

Ran reluctantly returned her attention to her full plate. Not for the first time since their arrival, she rather forlornly wished that this party was more along the familiar lines of famous-and-wealthy rather than intelligent-and-accomplished. In some ways, however, it still was. While the majority did appear considerably well-off, affluence seemed a minor point in comparison to recognition and reputation – among one's peers, that is. Earlier, before everyone had sat down to the elaborate multicultural dinner that Ran was currently poking with her fork, she had observed a lot of obvious pointing and wide-eyed expressions as the attendees spotted their favorite academic idols, whose pictures they had only seen in research journals or on the back of foreign-language books. She had almost laughed at the ridiculous and blatant hero-worship until Shinichi had eagerly pointed out an American professor he was eager to meet, as the man – according to Jodie-sensei – helped solve criminal cases for the FBI with his mathematic expertise. Ran had swallowed her ridicule, though she hadn't been able to keep a small grin off of her face at his geeky enthusiasm.

She was suddenly roused out of her reverie as Shinichi abruptly switched back to his native tongue. "So you are interested in detective work as well, Gordon-san?" Ran looked up to find that the German had turned away, and that Shinichi was now addressing the chubby, bespectacled, brown-haired man across the table. From appearances, Ran guessed he was probably half-Japanese.

"Ah, yes, well," Gordon replied with a wide smile, wiping some stray crumbs off his argyle sweater vest, "though, it's really only a hobby for me. A minor one, really. As a chemist, I am most interested in the forensics part of it all. I'd rather work with the minute evidence already set on the slides, you know; I don't know if I could even think logically, if I had to examine the whole picture, the crime scene and… and the dead bodies and all. My stomach probably couldn't handle it!"

Gordon's cheery grin seemed to encompass both Shinichi and herself, so Ran hesitantly smiled back. Her silent response seemed to make his smile grow even broader, if that was possible.

"Chemistry?" Shinichi questioned, and Gordon nodded happily. "That's interesting. Shiho– excuse me, Miyano-san is a biochemist, and she has assisted me immensely in solving a lot of cases with her special knowledge." Shinichi gestured towards the woman to his left, who raised a thin eyebrow questioningly at her sudden inclusion in the conversation, soup spoon poised halfway to her mouth.

"Really?" Gordon leaned in with excitement. "Biochemistry and criminal cases? How wonderful! Well, isn't this just great, meeting others like ourselves?"

"Thrilling," Shiho replied dryly, then returned to her dinner. Ran thought she saw Shinichi's mouth twitch.

Gordon, however, was not so easily put off. "I say, what is your favorite field of study, then? Nucleic acids? Enzymes? I myself fancy working with triglycerides. Ha!" He slapped his stomach heartily for emphasis. "You see?"

Ran, confused, looked to her boyfriend for understanding. Shinichi's expression was of vaguely amused exasperation, a carbon copy of Shiho's. After a moment, however, the woman resumed her normal somber air.

"Apoptosis." Shiho dabbed at her mouth with a white linen napkin, then stared Gordon straight in the eye. "My dissertation was on apoptosis, and I have been working primarily in that field ever since."

Gordon now leaned back dramatically. "Apoptosis? What a potentially dismal subject that could be! But I'm quite impressed that– wait, dissertation?" He adjusted his glasses. "You've already pursued your doctorate? And achieved it? …How old – I mean to say – you don't seem old enough to – well, I suppose, we're all here at this gathering for a reason, right? We're all too smart for our own good. But I just finished my master's two months ago!"

As the eager man was not exactly the quietest person at the table, Ran noticed that quite a few of the academics seated nearby had ceased their own conversations and had turned to watch the exchange with interest. While most returned to their dinners and companions after a moment, Ran observed that several young men, rather handsome and nicely dressed, had continued to stare in their direction with obvious interest. Ran felt her face grow hot.

"What's wrong?" She was slightly startled by Shinichi's warm breath on her skin as he whispered in her ear. She turned to him quickly, registered his sincere expression of concern, and, red-faced, stared down at her plate.

"It's… it's nothing… Nothing at all. …Really." She paused for a long moment, swirling some whipped potatoes around with her fork. She was nervous, but glad; her boyfriend had finally realized that he was, well, _neglecting_ her. She then sighed, setting the fork aside. "...It's just –"

But when she looked up to tell him her honest feelings – of apprehension, of inadequacy – she found that he had turned back to the continuing conversation between the two chemists. She froze in place, watching as both Shinichi and Shiho reached for their glasses, took a sip of the contents, and replaced them on the table in complete synchronization.

"Well, isn't apoptosis just fascinating?" Gordon jabbed an elbow into the German's side. The man looked surprised, but, sensing that he was being asked for a response in a language he didn't understand, nodded hesitantly. Gordon grinned. "Of course it is! Now, Miyano-san… you wouldn't happen to be a member of Mensa, would you?"

"Yes," she answered coolly, "since I was four."

"Really?" Shinichi suddenly asked, or rather – in Ran's opinion – blurted out.

"What?" was the woman's abruptly haughty reply. "You think it improbable?"

"Wha-? No! I didn't say that…" Shinichi assured her a little too quickly, obviously startled by the narrow-eyed glare he received.

"Do you need some evidence, _tantei-kun_?" She continued scathingly. "A membership card, perhaps, or a certificate of induction? Because I do not have either of those on my person at the moment."

"No, no! I believe you! …Really!" He scratched at the back of his head with a nervous laugh.

After a long pause, in which the miffed Shiho must have been assessing his sincerity, she returned to her soup. Ran heard Shinichi give a small sigh of relief before he started at Shiho's serene inquiry: "And is the Great Detective of the East a member of Mensa himself?"

"Oi!"

The rest of the mealtime conversation continued in much the same vein, though Ran did not remember the majority of it. She found herself understanding less and less of what Shinichi, Shiho, and the incorrigible Gordon-san were discussing, and consequently found her attention drifting further and further away from them. She gave up on contributing to any of the dialogue going on around her. Instead, she gazed listlessly around the room, vaguely wondering if she could somehow spot that American mathematician for Shinichi, and actually spent several muddled minutes just watching a young, messy-haired Japanese man savoring a piece of strawberry cheesecake. Dolefully, she envied his unfettered appetite.

An immeasurable amount of time later, Ran was suddenly jolted from her isolated reverie by a scraping of various chairs being pushed away from the table. She blinked in surprise at the abrupt action, lifting her head up before realizing that she had been inelegantly resting the side of her face against her supporting arm. She rubbed her sore cheek and quickly adjusted her slumping poufy sleeves, looking to Shinichi for her next cue. He was already standing in front of his chair, though he had turned away from her towards Shiho and was now discussing some issue in a mixture of both Japanese and English.

Ran spared a glance down at Shinichi's plate. It was completely empty, making her nearly full plate look, next to his, rather ridiculous, as if the sophisticated cuisine had been too much for her relatively unschooled taste. Shiho's soup bowl was empty as well, the spoon resting elegantly on the folded linen napkin tucked against the bowl's saucer. Ran looked to her own plate again; she had pushed around its contents so much that it had really formed one great mushy mass. She bit her lip and, not knowing what else to do, tried to arrange her fork on her unfolded napkin the way that Shiho had.

"Are you ready, Ran?" Wide-eyed, she glanced up at Shinichi, who was giving her a peculiar look. And Ran's eyes went, unbidden, past her boyfriend and locked with Shiho's. The chemist's expression was solemnly neutral, though Ran felt a bit of a chill go up her spine at the piercing gaze.

"…Yes. I'm… ready." She quickly stood up, and her scraping chair made a loud, startling noise. For a moment, Shinichi seemed about to offer her his arm, but Ran must have imagined it in her desperation, for instead he turned and walked casually away from the table, joining the throng of guests, with Shiho a pace or two from his side. Ran hastened to catch up, and nearly tripped in the red high heels that she had borrowed from Sonoko. For once, she was glad that her boyfriend had not been looking at her to see that near disaster.

"So… what are we doing now?" she asked when she had finally caught up, and was a little surprised that her voice cracked. Shinichi didn't notice this, or at least, paid it no mind.

"Oh! Well, we are waiting for the staff to clear the tables, and then they are going to start the music, for those who want to dance." His explanation was momentarily interrupt by a small snort of derision from the chemist. Ran suddenly wondered if Shiho was good at ballroom dancing, too. "And, uh… everyone else will just, you know, talk and hang out for a while, until the next event."

More socializing. Wonderful, Ran thought, her heart rather sinking. But as the tables were stripped by the uniformed waiters, and most tables were pulled to one side, she found herself unconsciously reaching for Shinichi's unoffered right arm. She glanced at him uncertainly, then, to gauge his reaction, and suddenly found herself giddy in happiness. He smiled at her warmly, with a tinge of a blush on his face. She smiled back and as she leaned lightly against him, she found herself wondering why she had been so flustered about the dinner and the elevated conversation. Kudo Shinichi, her childhood friend, was now her boyfriend, and they would most certainly be together always; that much was crystal clear.

The lights were dimmed and the music began, first playing an exotic middle-paced tune with stirring female vocals in some ancient European language. Most of the guests seemed rather uncertain at first, as if their academic pursuits had kept them indoors so much that even a simple box step was beyond their comprehension, but then a small cluster across the room broke out in loud guffaws of laughter at an internal joke and two of their number nervously made their way out onto the rim of the cleared space. A few more couples slowly joined them, and before the end of the song, the floor was reasonably populated with swaying, twirling pairs, some much more skilled than others. Ran's spirits increased even more and she laughed, not unkindly, as one poor fellow nearly tripped over his partner's long skirt, for he reminded her strongly of dear Hondou Eisuke. Ran whispered as much in Shinichi's ear, and he smirked and agreed with her assessment.

As the third song played on, Ran noticed that many of the attendees were now chatting among themselves, but Shinichi made no move to join them, seeming to be rather content to stand on the sidelines and watch the dancers. Overwhelmed with cheer, she glanced past her boyfriend at Shiho. The woman was casually posed, with her delicate bare arms crossed, surveying the dancers with a similar content expression. Ran couldn't help but notice that Shiho seemed very natural in her silky, dark blue dress, which was decidedly un-poufy in any way and showed off very feminine curves.

Shiho suddenly broke the trio's silence, still staring out at the dance floor. "I am going to get a glass of oloroso from the refreshment table. Would you like some yourself?"

"Ah, not right now," Shinichi replied.

"Are you sure?"

Ran watched his eyes suddenly become as round as saucers as his head turned sharply to face Shiho. The woman finally spared the apparently shocked detective a glance; her eyes immediately narrowed.

"No, that question was _not_ what your mind just made it, Kudo-kun." His open mouth quickly snapped shut. Rolling her eyes, Shiho uncrossed her arms and strode gracefully off to the left, where the waiters had set up a table with drinks and various desserts. "Pervert."

"…Am not," Ran heard Shinichi mutter sulkily under his breath, as he stared back out at the dance floor. Ran squeezed his arm gently, and he shot her a blushing grin that made her heart flutter.

Several more songs went by, but her boyfriend made no move to ask her to dance. Ran was, honestly, rather relieved, as her knees felt a little weak from being so close to Shinichi in a fairly romantic setting… or perhaps it was because she was feeling a little weak from not eating very much at dinner. Regardless, she found that her mood remained very high. She couldn't wait to call Sonoko and Kazuha and tell them all about this evening. Kazuha would perhaps be a little jealous, as she had not been able to come with Heiji, but she knew that Sonoko would be ecstatic and would probably burst her eardrums by squealing too loudly into the phone.

As she gazed around the hall, she caught sight of Agasa-hakase, and when he waved at her from across the room, she smiled and waved happily back, nudging Shinichi to do the same. She tried once more to identify that mathematician in the crowd, as Shinichi had apparently not seen the man yet either, and found herself instead spotting the _ainoko_ Gordon. He was now engaged in animated discussion with the young, handsome men that Ran had spotted staring at them earlier during dinner. And to her surprise, she saw Gordon motion at she and Shinichi, and saw the men glance curiously in their direction. A moment later, one of them began to casually make his way towards them, his fellows smirking and gesturing him on with their wine glasses.

Suddenly nervous, Ran clutched her boyfriend's arm a little tighter. "Um, Shinichi…"

"What is it?"

"It's that… that guy coming this way. He…" Ran found that she could say no more, for the man had now approached them. He was Japanese, with a tailored suit and a stylish, cosmopolitan hair cut.

"Nice gathering, isn't it?" he asked directly of Shinichi.

"Oh, yes," Shinichi replied amiably enough.

"You're that detective, right? Kudo Shinichi. I've read all about you in the papers, of course, and seen you on the news." The man smiled, and it wasn't the stalker-like smile that Ran had imagined it would be. She felt a little bit of her anxiety fade. The man held out his hand, and Shinichi shook it. "Your skills in deduction and logic are quite impressive."

"Thank you," Shinichi replied, pleased, and though the response was still not quite humble, Ran was glad that her boyfriend was not as arrogant as he once had been, before the whole Conan mess. The man asked Shinichi a few more questions about some of his more recent public cases, and he answered them quite happily; Ran was just as pleased at this sort of conversation, for she had been present at most of those cases, and knew all of Shinichi's reasoning behind the deductions.

Ran couldn't shake the feeling that this was only necessary small talk, however, and that the man was leading up to something else. She found that she was quickly proven correct.

"…You know," the man said, a slightly different tone to his voice, "I don't mean to pry, but you and your girlfriend seem pretty close. That's nice."

Shinichi seemed just as startled as Ran was at this change in subject. "Oh! Uh, thanks."

"It's great to have someone like that, who you can talk with on the same level, isn't it?" The man went on, stirring the wine in his glass with a twitch of his hand. "I had a girlfriend once, who was pleasant and pretty and all that, but just couldn't fathom quantum mechanics. All our dates were rather awkward." He laughed. "I would start talking about the EPR paradox, and she would want to talk about Prada… and, well, you can guess how that went."

He took a sip of the wine. Shinichi smiled, though he seemed a little confused. Ran was extraordinarily confused. Sure, she could understand Shinichi's cases, once he had laid out all the evidence and explained the connections, but…

"Anyway, you two look really good together, and you seem very much in sync, you know?" The man smiled again, a little wistfully. "I noticed at dinner that you two have a lot of the same mannerisms. And your facial expressions, they were exactly alike! You two must have been together for a long time now."

"Well, we've known each other since we were kids," Shinichi explained, grinning slightly as Ran unobtrusively squeezed his arm, "and we've been friends for a long time, but we've only been a, uh, couple for a little while."

"You must have been together always, then." He was still smiling, but the man's expression was rather nervous now. "Well, I was just wondering if, maybe… don't think I'm trying to encroach on your territory or anything, but, uh… I was wondering if maybe I could ask your girlfriend for a dance?"

That was quite the last thing that Ran was expecting. Her eyes grew wide. She had been standing at Shinichi's side this whole time, but the man hadn't even spared her one glance.

"What?!"

"Wait! I just mean, I wanted to talk to her about a few things involving her work! That guy over there–" the man, clearly alarmed at Shinichi's expression, jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at Gordon, who was blissfully talking to someone else, "–said that your girlfriend is a genius, and that she could probably help me with the project I am stuck on! I swear, I just wanted one dance to make that proposition, but see, I wanted to ask you first if that was okay."

"…Wait, what?" Shinichi stared at the man, completely baffled. The man looked baffled now as well. "I don't–"

"Isn't that your girlfriend over there?" He looked around and pointed across the room at a woman next to the refreshment table.

It was Shiho.

There was a long, stunned silence.

"…No," Shinichi finally choked out.

"Oh my–" the man suddenly stopped, turning back to them. His wide eyes finally fell on Ran, clutching Shinichi's arm, and he put his hand over his mouth. This action was not enough, however, to muffle his shocked whisper: "I thought _she_ was your sister…!"

His sister. Ran was frozen still.

Not again.

The moment finally passed, and the man was saying apologetically, "Kudo-tantei, I am _so_ sorry! I had no idea…! It's just, that guy over there, told me that you and that woman, were, like…"

"No, uh… No, that is my, er…" Shinichi seemed at a complete loss for words now. "She is, uh, that is… just a friend. Just a friend. …Her name is Miyano Shiho, and she is not, uh… anyone's girlfriend."

"…_Really?_" The man seemed to recover a little with this new piece of information. "_I see_… Well, I'm really sorry for that mix-up! Really, I am! I didn't mean to, uh, cause you two," he looked at both Ran and Shinichi, "any stress or anything. …Well, I guess I'll just be going now…" He began to back away. "Um, good luck on your cases, Kudo-tantei, and it was very nice meeting you!" And the man quickly walked away. His friends across the room hurried to catch up with him.

There was silence. Ran stared after them blankly, but out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Shinichi was not looking at her.

"…Shinichi?" She didn't know quite what she was asking, but she needed him to respond. She needed him to say something, anything! What he had told the man had not been enough. He had said that Shiho was "just a friend," but he had never said aloud that she, Mouri Ran, was _Kudo Shinichi's official, honest-to-goodness girlfriend… _

"Shinichi? …Shinichi? Answer me!" She tugged on his arm anxiously, trying vainly to get his attention. But he was not looking at her. He was staring off across the room at the refreshment table. Ran finally stared in that direction, too. The man and his followers had formed a sort of cluster around Shiho, who was casually posed with her wine glass in her hand, but Ran could, even this far away, see the dangerously annoyed expression on the woman's face.

"Shinichi!"

"I…" He had opened his mouth to speak, but nothing more than that one word came out. His eyes never left Shiho.

Suddenly, there was chaos. Ran heard a loud crash, the sound of shattering glass, and a loud chorus of screams, but before her mind could process all of that, guests began dashing away from the other side of the room in a panic. Several uniformed staff, who had been lounging in boredom nearby, suddenly leapt to attention and ran instead towards the source of the commotion. Shinichi started violently, his attention redirected from the refreshment table as the people who had not fled began to form a dense cluster around something on the floor.

Exclamations and shrieks in many different languages resounded throughout the hall, and Shinichi looked around, trying to catch someone who spoke one of the languages that he knew as they flew past. As one woman overtook them, Ran heard the lady distinctly cry to herself, in Japanese, "Oh, God, that man's dead!"

"…Shin–"

"Kudo-kun!" Suddenly, through the chaos, Shiho emerged in front of them, her silk dress flowing wildly around her. The wine glass was gone, and, delicate forehead furrowed, she grabbed Shinichi's left wrist as the panicked crowd threatened to knock her out of the way. "The man, they think he's been poisoned. The staff is calling an ambulance, and the police, right now. But if you don't want your suspects to get away, detective, you are going to have to get everyone calmed down, and if you don't want your crime scene disturbed, you better get it secured now, because there are some very fascinated forensic scientists in this crowd!"

"….Alright, I'll…" He paused as Shiho tugged on his wrist, inclining her head towards the mass of people who were observing the crime scene, many with obvious academic interest. Uncertainly but pleadingly, he turned to look at the other woman, the one he had been together always with this night.

"Ran…?"

Ran was silent for a moment. Shinichi had not answered her question yet, her very, very important question. But her eyes rose, and she met the piercing, intelligent gaze of Miyano Shiho once more.

She let go of his arm.

"Go…" Listlessly, her hands dropped to her side, and her red poufy sleeves slid off her shoulders. "Go."

Neither Shinichi nor Shiho gave Ran any more time to elaborate, for the woman pulled him by the wrist into the panicked crowd and over to the crime scene, where the detective and the scientist were sure, with their combined genius and synchronization, to solve the mysterious poisoning of the dead man long before the police could reach the convention hall.


	9. Red and White

**Fandom: **Detective Conan

**Title: **Red and White

**Author: **Eeveebeth Fejvu

**Theme: **#34 – It's hard not to love you

**Pairing/Characters: **Edogawa Conan and Haibara Ai (et al)

**Rating:** K+

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Detective Conan_. I asked Haibara to make me a pill that would somehow turn me into the creator of the shrunken detective, but my order is in line behind the antidote to Apoptoxin-4869. So, for now, I write fan fiction.

**Dedication: **This one's for Thu. Sorry it's so late! I hope you still like it!

**Summary: **The contents of the photo on top caught his attention.

**Author's Note: **Something a bit… _different_, to celebrate the awesome release of _Detective Conan _File 700. This theme takes place during the "Clash of Red and Black" arc (files 595-609; episodes 491-504). Spoilers for this arc, and for the "Red Robbery" arc (files 677-679).

* * *

Panting in exertion and exhilaration, Conan struggled to keep up with Akai's long, brisk strides.

He cursed his short, child's legs, not for the first time. Fortunately, though, he had just caught sight of their target a little ways ahead – a pristine night-blue Chevy, parallel parked across the street in front of a convenience store. A small relief; he wouldn't have to sprint at this hurried pace for much longer, then.

Glancing over and up, Conan saw that his current partner had assumed an expression of relaxed disinterest – his most common one, it seemed. It effortlessly covered up any anxiety or excitement that the FBI agent might be feeling, now that action was finally being taken and all carefully thought-out plans were underway. The man's hands were shoved almost carelessly into the pockets of his black jacket, and his pace was inconspicuous for all of its speed and intent. His inherent coolness clashed strongly with the unbound, apprehensive energy of the bespectacled boy at his side.

Conan's short sigh was instantly lost among his panting as he stumbled to a halt, almost crashing into the man's legs, as Akai stopped to wait for the heavy traffic in front of them to dissipate. The Chevrolet C-1500 was directly across the street now. Conan used the pause to adjust his red bowtie with one hand, loosening it a bit to get a bigger breath of air. Though Akai stood as tall and motionless as a post, Conan couldn't help but shift his weight back and forth, sneakers scuffing against the concrete sidewalk. His shins were throbbing slightly under all the strain.

By Conan's estimation, Akai must have parked his truck at least a kilometer away from the hospital, clearly hoping to shake off the eyes of the Black Organization until the moment when they – Akai, rather – actually _needed_ to attract their attention.

Suddenly, Akai stepped off the sidewalk into the road, cleared for a moment, though more cars were already barreling in their direction. Conan blinked and quickly hurried to catch up, only slightly put off by the agent's jaywalking. With the instinct of one used to being overlooked, he hastened to Akai's side, the taller of them in-between the boy and the oncoming traffic.

This proved to be a fortunate choice, for as they crossed into the final lane before reaching the sidewalk, a speeding van slammed on its breaks and came to an abrupt, screeching halt not two feet away from the agent. Conan flinched, faltering, but Akai never even glanced in the van's direction until the van's furious driver pressed down hard upon his horn and started yelling profanities out his open window. Conan didn't catch the face that Akai turned to the man, but it must have held a truly intimidating expression, for the driver immediately released his horn, clamped his mouth shut, and stared at them with wide, frightened eyes.

The agent continued indifferently to the Chevy, not sparing the van another glance, and Conan tripped his way around to the passenger side, on the right in this foreign-made vehicle. Hearing the lock release, Conan reached up for the handle, pulled open the heavy door, and scrambled into the high seat of the truck, closing the door behind him with a grunt. He fumbled for the seatbelt and finally managed to pull it across his chest, snapping it into place. In the driver's seat, Akai did the same, briefly adjusting the side mirror with a practiced hand before sliding the truck's key into the ignition switch.

The Chevy's engine roared to life, the whole truck vibrating and quivering in anticipation, like a hunting dog about to be released. Akai finally spared the small detective a brief, wicked grin. Conan found himself returning it, though his childish face made the expression more disturbing.

The Chevy suddenly bolted forward as Akai pressed on the gas and steered the truck out of its parking spot and onto the street. Conan grasped at the seat underneath him; this vehicle had much more power in it than the vehicles he was used to. After a moment, however, as stores and trees and pedestrians flashed past the side window, he adjusted to the car's energy and speed. He relaxed into the passenger seat in silence, having nothing more to do at the moment but wait and watch for black Porsches in the rearview mirror.

Though he was driving and also keeping an eye out for any Organization members, Akai seemed to relax into his seat as well. A minute, then two, of silence grew between them, though Conan still felt the man's presence strongly.

He was glad for Akai's company, and for the connection between the FBI agent and himself. Much of this connection had been forged over the present crisis and during a long nighttime talk on the hospital roof, but it was already a strong, almost comfortable one. And in this vehicle, Conan's lack of stature and apparent age didn't seem to matter as much as it had before. The dissonance between them and their respective lifestyles seemed to lessen when it came to their mutual sharp intellect, their deductive talents, their abilities to strategize and anticipate, and their deep fixation on taking down the Black Organization.

Conan was running through his and Akai's elaborate plans once more in his mind, speculating whether or not they might have tangled themselves up in too much reverse psychology this time, when the agent shifted in his seat. The motion drew Conan's attention to the man's face, where he saw a narrow, olive-green eye peering at him from behind wavy strands of loose black hair. Though still clearly watching the road ahead, Akai seemed to be just as focused on the boy in the passenger seat. Conan blinked. He was used to staring at others intently in investigation, not the other way around.

Akai suddenly motioned in Conan's direction with his head, and said, "Check the glove box… See that _they_ didn't find my truck… and leave us any more 'presents.'" Conan nodded, leaned forward, and cautiously opened the compartment in front of him. A small bulb on the inside gave him just enough light to see that the glove box was stuffed with various crumpled documents, a large handful of photographs, a wrinkled packet of cigarettes, and a Glock 26 (_most likely loaded_, he thought). Conan brushed a hand over the contents, shuffling them around, but no small, ticking box – a bomb, like those in the hospital gift baskets and Black's flowerpot – surfaced. The Organization had not found Akai Shuichi's Chevy, or, at least, had not tampered with it.

Conan, suddenly remembering his own tampering with Gin's Porsche that long-ago winter's day, was about to restart his search – now on the lookout for tracking devices and microphones – when a shallow pothole in the road caused the truck to shake and the whole pile of photographs to tumble out of the glove box into Conan's lap. Surprised, he made a wild grab for them, and managed to catch most of them, though a few escaped to the floor of the cab.

"Sorry about that," Akai murmured. While the truck came to a halt at a red light next to Haido Park, he reached over with one hand to help Conan stuff them back into the glove box. When the light changed again, he returned his attention to the steering wheel.

Conan leaned over to check the floor of the cab beneath his feet, and strained with one arm to reach the few photos he had not caught. He had to maneuver himself into an awkward position to do this, though, for he was trying to avoid taking off his seat belt, just in case Akai had take any sudden action. It would be just too embarrassing to go flying across the cab, as small and relatively light as he was at the moment. After a short struggle, Conan was able to grasp several between the tips of two fingers. He added them to the small pile still in his lap, and was about to reach down for the last one, when the contents of the photo on top caught his attention.

He had already noticed that the pictures were from FBI surveillance; all were fairly recent and many were taken quite obviously in secret, with the photographed people oblivious to the camera, often caught in mid-speech, and with bushes and window blinds occasionally obscuring the subjects. Many of the people in the photographs were unknown to Conan, though he had noticed quite a few of Mizunashi Rena (both awake and in a coma), several with Ran, Sonoko, and Eisuke (apparently on their way home from school), and even a two or three of himself, accompanied by Mouri and Ran or the police.

The photo on the top of his pile was different. Closing the glove box momentarily, Conan held the photo closer to his eyes, turning it in his hands. It was much older than the rest, showing signs of a slight yellowing on the back and with one corner bent into a crease; it had to be at least five or six years old, Conan guessed. Even stranger, it was not a surveillance photo at all, but a posed photograph of several smiling people dressed quite formally, a lively ballroom their backdrop. It must have been some sort of group function, Conan realized in surprise, as he recognized several of them as FBI agents he had met at the hospital. And on the far right, almost out of the picture, stood a stunning couple, the man's arm casually draped around the woman's waist as she leaned happily into his shoulder.

The man could be no one other than a younger Akai Shuichi. The narrow olive eyes were brighter without the dark bags under them, and the hair was long enough to disappear behind his suit jacket, and he looked strange without the dark tuque, but it was still Akai Shuichi. And the woman, who was wearing a rather revealing red dress… Conan blinked twice.

"Yes… that's Agent Starling… Jodie. And me." Conan looked up to see an obscure expression on Akai's face. He seemed a little amused, a little sad, before his face once again relaxed into disinterest… Perhaps it was an expression of nostalgia, Conan considered.

A million questions surfaced in his mind: about the event in the picture, about the date it was taken, about the odd physical closeness of Akai and Jodie-sensei… but a glance at the truck's side mirror made him quickly realize that, if ever there was a time, now was not the time to ask.

Conan placed the photo back onto the pile in his lap and leaned toward the mirror. He frowned at the familiar woman on the violet motorcycle. She had seemingly come from nowhere to ride close behind the night-blue Chevrolet.

_Platinum blonde long hair… _Through her helmet's visor, Conan could dimly see the woman's intense, narrow gaze. _It's Vermouth. _

"Hmm… We meet again." Conan glanced over to see a smile on the FBI agent's face. He had obviously seen Vermouth from the rearview mirror and was happy that things were going as planned. Before Conan could say a word, Akai had grabbed the Chevy's gear stick, shifted it into the next gear, and had the gas pedal pressed all of the way to the floor.

With a screech, the Chevy shot forward and Akai swung the steering wheel, swerving around a car into the next lane, passing another car, speeding back into the first lane. It was a challenge to Vermouth, Conan knew, to follow blindly or turn away at a possible trap. As Akai slipped the truck in between two cars on the highway, Conan felt the photos slipping out of his lap. He grabbed them quickly, and shuffled them into a neat stack. The party photo with the younger Akai and Jodie-sensei was on top.

Conan carefully opened the glove box, placed the stack of photos inside, and closed it with a click. It was time to get his head back in this deadly, high-stakes game. Akai was obviously used to focusing on the task at hand, and Conan saw that it was smarter to think like an FBI agent right now rather than an inquisitive detective.

…Except, it seemed, Akai could focus on manipulating the actions of a criminal syndicate _and_ talk about a completely different matter at the same time.

"I expected you to ask more questions, _tantei-san,_" Akai said, still smiling and glancing at his side mirror, in which Vermouth and her motorcycle were rapidly shrinking into the distance. He released his intense pressure on the gas pedal, if only a little. "I would have if I were you."

"_Is _this really the time?" Conan wondered aloud. Akai gave a small, barking laugh.

"Don't let such opportunities slip away when you are presented with them," he advised seriously, "because you never know when it might be… your last chance."

Sobered, Conan contemplated what he might ask, if anything. It rather seemed as if Akai _wanted _to talk about the strange photograph, but was allowing the detective to make the first move. Finally, Conan settled for "…You and Jodie-sensei seemed… rather close. …Was the photo taken before you went undercover… in the Organization?"

"...Yes… and yes." Akai steered into the next lane. "It was less than a week after that party that the decision to send me undercover was finalized. Less than a week after that, and I was already 'wearing black,' you could say…

"She didn't take it very well," he finally continued, "especially at first. …She wanted to at least have a way to contact me, but it would have been much too dangerous–"

"Wait, who? …_Jodie-sensei?_" A strange possibility – at least one that had never occurred to him before – began to take root in Conan's mind. "Were…" _If my deduction is wrong, it's going to be so embarrassing, _he thought. "Were… you and Jodie-sensei…?"

"Lovers?" Akai finished for him, casual and neutral as ever.

Conan felt dry exasperation fall over his features. _I was going to say "boyfriend and girlfriend…"_

"…We were." The Chevy grumbled to a temporary halt at a red light, then shot forward ahead of the cars in the other lanes as the green light appeared. With a start, Conan tried to suppress several disconcerting mental images. Akai went on, regardless of his disturbed expression. "We were much younger then… and right now, she and I are… friends. Good friends, and partners in the Bureau.

"But… I still love her very much. …Is that all you were going to ask?"

Conan felt himself gape open-mouthed at the FBI agent in the driver's seat. As strange as it was to think of Akai Shuichi and Jodie-sensei… _together_… it was just as absurd to think of this rough, intimidating, cigarette-smoking sniper as someone with feelings as tender as that of romantic love…

Except…

"What about Miyano Akemi?!"

Even Conan was surprised at the vehemence in his exclamation. Akai looked away from the road for a moment, eyebrows raised, curious. "Oh? …James and Jodie told you, did they?"

Conan opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He nodded instead.

Akai made a sort of humming noise, as if considering Conan's response, though his attention had already turned back to his driving.

There was a long pause, the silence only filled by the growling of the Chevy's powerful engine. Conan adjusted his glasses, fidgeting. From the other FBI agents' comments, he had found himself convinced that Akai Shuichi had truly cared for – had even loved – Miyano Akemi, despite using his relationship with her to approach the Organization. And something about that idea had made Conan feel even closer to the mysterious agent.

He had known Akemi, after all – though under a different name and for only a short while before she had died in his arms – and something about the young woman's face, her smile, her concern for others… She had reminded him of Ran.

And if Akai had feelings for Akemi the way that he had feelings for Ran, then… they were similar in more ways than their intelligence and drive.

"Would you understand," Akai said slowly, and Conan immediately looked back up at the agent's profiled face, "if I said that I loved… love… Miyano Akemi, as well?"

Conan frowned. "…Not quite." _How is that supposed to work? You just said you loved Jodie-sensei…_

Akai sighed. "…I have been… blessed? Cursed?" He smirked wryly. "…Well, in any case, I have the sort of… inconvenient personality… that makes it hard for me not to love Akemi and Jodie at the same time." Conan's eyes widened, uncertain. "To love two women the same way, for different reasons, but with just as much… intensity… I assure you, it is very inconvenient. …I see that you don't think such a thing is possible, considering your obvious devotion to… Mouri-tantei's daughter."

Conan blinked. True, Akai had seen him with Ran before, even holding her hand, but still…

"Perhaps, though, if you consider _yourself_ a little further, you might understand better."

With a tilt of his head, Akai motioned towards the passenger side floorboard, eyes never leaving the road. Conan glanced down. There was the one photograph he had failed to pick up, lying face-down beneath his dangling feet. Struggling against his confining seatbelt, he managed to twist his small body around just enough to grasp the very edge of the photo. He sat back up, leaning back against the seat cushion, and turned the photo over.

…_So it was the FBI who had been following us back then! I knew it wasn't any of mom's fans…_

He had recognized the event almost instantly. It was from the time when his mother – that crazy old lady – had dragged him, along with the Shonen Tantei, to see the test screening of _Kamen Yaiba 2._ Not only was the film studio building in the background, but there was Kudo Yukiko, Genta, Mitsuhiko, and himself headed for the entrance. Ayumi was unknowingly turned towards the camera, calling out to the girl in the foreground, who was looking over her shoulder suspiciously, knowing she was being watched but unable to pinpoint the threat.

Haibara.

Great detective that he was, it took Conan a moment to realize just what Akai was implying. Dismay automatically welled up in his mind, rejecting the idea that he could ever think of… feel that way… about the sarcastic, cynical scientist. It was ridiculous, it was silly… how could Akai Shuichi know or even guess anything about his relationship with Haibara? Sure, the FBI agent had known her older self – Miyano Shiho – but… Conan's relationship with her wasn't at all like the one he had with Ran…

But even as those thoughts occurred, a warm sensation flooded his cheeks just at the sight of her face in the photograph. "_To love two women the same way, for different reasons, but with just as much intensity…"_ The warmth seemed to flood into his chest as well. While his mind might only be opened to strange ideas when it came to solving mysteries, perhaps his heart was less constricted…

Akai Shuichi had always seemed to know things that he had no reason to know.

The sound of a cell phone ringing filled the Chevy's cab. It wasn't one of his, Conan knew, so it had to belong to the FBI agent. Suddenly more alert, Akai steered the truck off to the side of the road, where he parked it and slipped a slick silver cell phone out of his jacket.

He flicked it open, listening but not speaking.

"Thanks," he said after a moment, "A job well done." Snapping the phone shut with one hand, he looked down at Conan, smirking triumphantly. It seemed that all of their elaborate plans had been executed successfully. And yet, the FBI agent's olive eyes were too bright for that to be his only achievement.

Clutching the photograph of Haibara in his small, child's hands, Conan looked up at the agent with a meaningful smirk.

Perhaps he and Akai were more alike than he had thought.


	10. Repression

**Fandom: **Detective Conan

**Title: **Repression

**Author: **Eeveebeth Fejvu

**Theme: **#40 – It's just a nightmare

**Pairing/Characters: **Kudo Shinichi and Sherry

**Rating:** T for sexuality and disturbing images

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Detective Conan_. I asked Haibara to make me a pill that would somehow turn me into the creator of the shrunken tantei-san, but my order is in line behind the antidote to Apoptoxin-4869. …So, for now, I write fan fiction.

**Dedication: **For Claude le noctambule, because I always greatly appreciate your reviews and your translation work with "Inertia". Also, the scenario in this theme corresponds with a scenario you and I once discussed years ago in the Aicoholics livejournal forum, though I wrote this piece even years before that.

**Summary:** She stood in the shadows… and waited for him to stir.

* * *

She stood in the shadows, pressing her clipboard tightly to her chest, and waited for him to stir. Her back ramrod straight, her lips pursed, and her eyes darkly challenging, she waited for the motionless form strapped securely to the mechanized lab table to show signs of regaining consciousness. She waited, her mind running through complex chemical equations, lists of symptoms, catalogs of failed trial versions. She waited patiently. She had all the time in the world.

The first sign of his awakening was in the twitch of his fingers. In a staccato movement, they curled towards the iron cuff that fastened his wrist to the table, then relaxed. She shifted her weight slightly onto one foot, then the other. The nerves throughout her body were tingling in distasteful anticipation. A moment later, his foot twitched, the ankle's movement restrained by an iron cuff as well. She waited.

After a time, his fingers twitched again, this time accompanied by a slight movement of his head. It would not be long now, she thought. Suddenly, he groaned, a soft but pained noise that shattered the stuffy silence of the laboratory. She took a soundless step forward, but elected to remain in the darkened corner, outside his line of vision. It wouldn't do for her face to be the first thing he saw.

A long moment passed before his fingers twitched again, this time in a deliberate movement. His eyes shot open. She watched passively as, for an instant, he tensed, stunned by the shaded bulb baring its brilliant white light down on him from above. A second later, his entire body jerked in an attempt to sit up. Unaware of the wrist and ankle restraints, his head slammed back against the table, causing a hollow metallic ring to echo throughout the room. Groaning, he pulled against the cuffs again, then began to struggle in disbelief. His lithe form writhed and twisted on the table in a way that made the nerves throughout her body tingle even stronger than before. She had to fight to keep her lips pursed professionally as he fought blindly, his eyes shut tightly against the glowing bulb piercing his vision.

After a moment or two, his body's struggle diminished, then ceased. She watched, fascinated, as he seemed to gather his wits and methodically view his surroundings, an expected move considering his occupation. His head turned calmly to the right to observe the cuff on his right arm, then to the left to observe the other, then, squinting, towards the light bulb. The only sign of his discomfort at the moment was the grunt that escaped his lips from his movement. No doubt his head was throbbing from the light, his recent struggle, and the bloodied wound on the back of his head, though she had already tended to the latter long before now.

"Hello?" His voice was hoarse, and the question came out weakly and unsure. He coughed, and after a listening pause, repeated his question, his tone decidedly more assured and commanding. She felt her nerves tingle. "Hello? …Is anyone there?"

She clutched her clipboard even harder and gave up on maintaining her pursed lips. The smile she finally allowed herself was far from the sweet one that her sister always tried to coax out of her, but she was hardly the same person her sister knew at the moment. In fact, her sister wouldn't even recognize her right now. Smiling mysteriously, she ran one hand silently through her hair in a last minute attempt to perfect her appearance, as if preparing to go on a date. She almost laughed aloud. No, there was no way her sister would have recognized her right now.

"…Why don't you just come out where I can see you?" He spoke up low and confident, knowing without a doubt that he was not alone, not talking to air. "I know you're there, in the shadows. I know I saw movement a moment ago… and I can hear you breathe." It was a wonder that he couldn't hear her fluttering heartbeat, she thought, and the adrenaline pounding through her body.

A moment more and she could no longer deny him or his command. She stepped slowly and with poise as she appeared to him from the shadows, allowing her lab coat to rasp softly as it flowed like silk over her slender frame. She relaxed her grip slightly on her clipboard, and, smiling, tilted her head just slightly to the side in an enigmatic manner. Being a famous detective and all, he must love mysteries, right?

"There is certainly no way I can fool you then, Kudo Shinichi-tantei," she said in greeting, her tone smooth and alluring. His vivid blue eyes, cold and distrustful, immediately locked onto hers as she paused at the foot of the table. Her stomach tingled. "Or perhaps you would prefer _meitantei_?"

He ignored her playful jab, scowling aggressively. "Who are you? And how do you know my name?" She herself had stripped him of his jacket and sweatshirt earlier to check for injuries, leaving him in only a thin white t-shirt; now, she unreservedly watched the well-defined muscles in his arms tighten as he clenched his fists. "Where am I? What are you doing to me?"

"Oh ho! You sure do ask your questions in quick succession, tantei-san." She chuckled slightly, coming to stand on his right side. "Do you interrogate all of your murder suspects this way? How do you ever get any answers if you're in such a rush?"

This teasing seemed to only make him more frenzied. "…Who are you?! Where am I?! … What the… If you've so much as _touched_ Ran, I'll–"

"Slow down, slow down, Kudo-san!" She gazed at him with a sweetly chiding expression. "I can promise you, the only person I have in my custody at the moment is yourself." She smiled demurely. "And you are the only person brought in by my… associates from the amusement park tonight. If you were with anyone else, I'm sure they are safe and sound." To be honest, she wasn't sure, but Gin had only mentioned this boy, and she herself had watched Vodka drag the teenage detective out of the back of Gin's Porsche a few hours ago. There had been no one else inside, at least in the backseat. Perhaps in the trunk, though…

Kudo relaxed visibly, settling back against the cold metal table to scowl at her guardedly, and she made a note of this in her mind. "So… those two men I followed… the two men in the black clothing are your associates…"

"Two black-clothed associates among many," she quipped. "Two amongst a… large _murder_ of crows."

Though his scowling face never changed expression, she swore she could see his mind racing in a clockwork fashion behind those vivid eyes. "A whole gang of killers and blackmailers, then, a… a criminal syndicate…"

It wasn't a question, but for her own amusement, she answered anyway. "That would be one way to put it. An organization… a blackened organization dedicated to personal gain through illegal activities… surely, Kudo-meitantei, you have come across cases involving more than just misunderstood manslaughter and accidental assassination in your illustrious career?"

"So I was caught witnessing a 'business transaction' I wasn't supposed to," Kudo relinquished sullenly, wincing as the bandaged wound on the back of his head pressed against the table. "…And…"

"Struck on the head with a convenient section of lead pipe," she completed, smiling. "So I was informed."

"So where am I now, then? Some… laboratory hideout used by this 'black organization'?"

She laughed sardonically at his contemptuous tone, running a hand through her short hair. "So the modern-day _Sherlock Holmes _truly earned his title… This particular lab belongs to _me_, Kudo-meitantei." She lowered her clipboard from its position against her chest and watched as his eyes immediately shifted to the uncovered nametag pinned to her lab coat's lapel: SHERRY – HEAD OF RESEARCH.

"So a criminal syndicate employs scientists as well as killers and thieves?" Kudo's voice had lowered considerably both in volume and vehemence, as if he were speaking only to himself. When his vivid blue eyes met her own once more, Sherry realized that he was starting to understand.

The disbelief and the anger had faded as his comprehension of his current situation quickly grew. He was in a laboratory with a high-status criminal scientist, strapped to a lab table with no way to escape from the iron cuffs that bound him. Even if he were to escape, he would have no idea which way to run, he would have no idea if any law-enforcement allies were looking for him or even knew him missing, and he would have no idea how to hide from the rest of the 'black organization' that would surely come after him. He was realizing what a dire predicament he was in was such speed that Sherry felt the nerves up her spine tingle with the greatest ferocity yet. What an amazing specimen he was.

"Research makes up a great deal of our work," she managed to concede without losing the last trace of the smile remaining on her face. "As the prized intellectual protégé of the organization – the girl who earned her PhD before she earned her majority – I was granted the privilege of becoming head of research, particularly in the biochemistry department. Unfortunately, unlike yourself, who is able to use your superior intellect in only the cases you so choose to take on, I have no choice in the project on which I am to focus all of my attention and skill. As a member of the organization since birth, I have inherited the project of my late scientist parents: Project 48."

There was a long silence as she continued to stare Kudo in the eyes from their close proximity. The mysterious smile began to tug at her lips again. It was enjoyable to discuss her work with someone who hadn't already heard the strange rumors that circulated amongst the codename-lacking members of the syndicate. With her eyes, she begged him to ask, pleaded with him to question her further. How dismally boring it is to continue unprompted.

Finally, he gave in, his voice filled with more dread than curiosity. "What exactly… _is _Project 48?"

"Project 48," she began, dropping her voice down to a whisper. She laid her clipboard quietly upon the edge of the table, then leaned towards him, her crossed arms resting on the clipboard, until her face was but a foot away from his. "Project 48… concerns the research of apoptosis – cell self-destruction – as applied to toxicology. …I am studying how to trigger apoptosis to occur in such a way that it works as an untraceable poison in the body's many systems, killing its victim in the most organic way possible. When completed, the 'apoptoxin' will be able deceive anyone, anyone who isn't looking particularly for it in lab testing, into believing that the death was natural, caused by a heart attack or stroke in accordance with the poison's side effects."

His eyes were wide in shock and outrage, though his lips remained tightly shut. Suddenly, he flinched against his will, and Sherry saw fear, raw terror, flare up in his stare. Her body tingled gleefully.

"So you know, don't you, Kudo-meitantei? I thought you would figure it out soon enough. …A few weeks ago, I completed Version 68 of Project 48. Every trial I conducted with this version either killed the victim but led to suspicious results on the lab report, or ended in an unwanted cell mutation. Some of the subjects in these latter trials didn't even die, but the end result required me to 'put them out of their misery,' you might say. Therefore, I was forced to move on to Version 69, and I feel that the minor adjustments I made in the chemical formula will assure the Project's success. I have finished creating Apoptoxin 4869 and the preliminary mice testing for this version. Now, I am ready to… begin the first human trial…"

"NO!" Screaming, Kudo struggled fiercely in his bonds, causing Sherry to jump at his sudden action and draw away from him. Disheveled, she snatched up her clipboard before his writhing knocked it off of the table, and stepping back, tucked a lock of hair nervously behind her ear. "NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!" The clanging of the hollow metal tabletop echoed loudly, causing her to wince. She yelled over the noise for him to stop, that his thrashing would accomplish nothing in this soundproof room, but soon gave up, knowing her yelling wouldn't accomplish anything either.

She should have known better than to think he would be indifferent and compliant. He was young, headstrong, and arrogant, all lending itself to a stubborn attitude that would not easily give up on preserving his life. And to think, only a few hours ago he was enjoying himself in that amusement park in the company of a dear friend – perhaps a girlfriend – named Ran, an entire lifetime spread out before him. An ironic smile tugged at her lips. How quickly things change.

It was many minutes before Kudo wore both his throat and his body out, leaving him lying fatigued and choking on the metal table. His arms' muscles continued to twitch in a desire to struggle again, but he was gasping for air, his chest rising and falling in short, ragged breaths. Beads of sweat glistened on his face, and the picture of him lying in front of her – hot, exhausted, and speechless – was nearly too much for her to stand. She almost lost it, her hands ready to drop the clipboard she held in favor of running her fingers across his reddened face, through his silky hair, down his neck, under the t-shirt sticking tightly to his chest. Her saving grace, however, was the one last "no…" that escaped his lips, pitiful and desperate. It reminding her of the labor that was before her.

"Well… I hope we've put all of that ridiculous… resistance behind us," Sherry finally spoke breathlessly. She approached the table again, eyes locked once more with his. "And now… to business…" She smiled coquettishly, but only received a look of desperation and abhorrence in return. She brushed it off, willing the fluttering in her stomach to stop.

Turning on her heel, she made her way around the lab table, letting her brisk step emphasize her femininity as the lab coat flowed with her curves. She did not turn her head to see if he was watching, but she was sure he was. Laying the clipboard next to the computer on the lab counter, she shuffled through the already copious files on Project 48 Version 69. The results of the mice experiments greatly resembled those of Version 68, though the frequency of death rather than mutation was much higher.

Yes, she thought, now was as good a time as any for the first human trial, especially with this particular specimen. She wondered if he knew that the syndicate had been watching him for some time, and even considered him a mild threat. Probably not, for all of his egotism and pride.

So she began, a demure smile on her face even as Kudo continued to hoarsely murmur his protesting "…no …no." First, she shifted the mechanized lab table from its horizontal position to a seventy-five degree slant, leaving Kudo almost upright with his feet hanging just inches from the ground. He gritted his teeth as his weight dragged him down and caused the pressure of the cuffs securing his wrists to increase. Though Sherry longed to leave him stretched out provocatively at her disposal, the apoptoxin would be more easily administered in this new position. She didn't dare release him from the cuffs in hopes of tying him to a chair, for even with a total understanding of his dire situation, he would undoubtedly try to and succeed in overpowering her and breaking free.

This completed, Sherry began the necessary documentation required of every experiment performed in the syndicate's laboratories. There were quite a lot of it. She seated herself elegantly in a chair within Kudo's range of vision, crossed her legs, and commenced her writings, the clipboard resting securely on her leg. As she wrote, she graced her captive was a commentary of her prose, intermittently glacing up at him with libidinous eyes to throw in a clarifying remark. Not long after she began to talk, his weak protests faded and died, and he listened in conceding silence. She felt her stomach tingle with pleasure at this surrender. This documentation was not required to be completed until after the experiment was performed, but doing it now allowed her more time: more time with him, more time for his vivid blue eyes to rest upon her and to pierce the eyes she turned upon his.

The minutes passed by slowly, but when Sherry found she could write nothing else until she had the experiment's results, she felt as if the time had flown by. She stood up, embracing the clipboard to her chest, and suddenly realized that the liquid running down Kudo's face no longer consisted of sweat. He dangled against the inclined table limply, his eyes vacant of emotion but overflowing with tears, which ran down his face to hang suspended on the edge of his chin. After a moment, she realized she was staring at him with a stunned look, and she quickly tried to mask the rogue expression with a clever smile.

It didn't work. "Please…" he whispered, his voice still hoarse with strain and emotion. "Please… please let me go…"

The smile faltered. "Come now, Kudo-meitantei. …Surely a great detective such as yourself is intelligent enough to know that I can't do that."

And he began to plead in earnest with her as she shuffled the documents, returned them to their folder, and readied the charts upon which she would collect her data. He gave her reason after reason: his parents needed him, his friends needed him, his city needed him to solve its crimes and to bring about justice. When this brought about no change in her replies, he began to bargain. If she would let him escape, he would not tell the police about the syndicate. If she helped him escape, he would take her with him and make sure she was protected from both the syndicate and from criminal charges.

When she finally admitted to having a sister she would never leave behind – providing she accepted his bargain, of course, which she would under no circumstances accept – he tried to appeal to this apparent weakness. "How do you think your sister would react if someone told her that you had been killed?" he challenged desperately.

This caused an ironic smile to flicker onto her face. "She would be sad, but not surprised," Sherry admitted. "Nor do I think anyone hearing of your own death will be surprised. You are a homicide detective, after all, and homicide detectives must make enemies of those whom they accuse and the accused's families." This affirmation of his fate caused his voice to fail him, for which Sherry was glad. He was so much more enticing when he wasn't speaking in that pathetic tone.

The next minutes passed in silence, and when Sherry turned around with the red-and-white pill labeled 'APTX-4869' in her hand, she found him with his head lowered to his chest.

"Well, Kudo-meitantei," she said with the air of someone saying goodbye to a departing friend, "I have certainly enjoyed your company. Now, however, it is time for the experiment to begin." He didn't so much as twitch as she came to stand only inches in front of him. "Oh, come now. Certainly you have some last words for me to pass on, don't you, Kudo-"

"I just… can't believe…" Quietly, he sighed, and then was silent. Sherry waited. "I… There's just so much that I haven't done."

"We all die with our lives unfinished," she replied in a tone just as contemplative as his own. He seemed calm, accepting now, and yet…

"I mean… just the little things. Nothing big, like going to visit some far off country or something crazy." His head lifted slightly off his chest. "Just the little things. Like calling my parents in the middle of the night, not to annoy them, but to tell them that I love them. Or just hanging out with the guys on the soccer team on the weekends. Or helping the professor finish an experiment he asked me for help with. All the stuff I always thought there would be more time for me to do in the future. Things I put off because I was… out on a case… Things like… like being with Ran… and telling her… how I…. how I feel about her…"

Regrets. Sherry tried to shake off the solemn sadness that was drowning her dark and rational mind, but it would not disappear. Instead, she suppressed it in the part of herself that was _not_ the criminal scientist, that was the young woman that her sister _really_ knew, to be dealt with at a later time. Resurfacing as merely Sherry, she smirked omnisciently.

"So you haven't even told your girlfriend how you feel about her? Shame on you, keeping such a nice girl waiting like that."

"I was never sure… if she felt the same way…"

"That's ridiculous. Hesitation only draws out suffering." Realizing the irony in her statement, she laughed. "So if she's not even your girlfriend, then I suppose you must be regretting all of those… benefits you've missed out on…"

Though he still refused to look at her, she could see his cheeks growing red.

"What an innocent boy you are, _meitantei_!" She teased mercilessly, quite enjoying herself. "A virgin and everything… I suppose you've not even had your first kiss…"

"I've… had a lot of cases to focus on…" he murmured uncomfortably.

Lightly she placed a palm against his cheek. "No intelligent and desirable young man like yourself should die in such an untainted state." At her comment, his head shot up and he stared at her in confusion. Whether it was her description of him or her last few words that caused his surprise, she couldn't tell. His vivid blue eyes, wide and bright, caused the tingling in her body to increase a hundred-fold. "Perhaps, then, I should liberate you of one of your regrets…"

With his face already captured in her hand, it did not take much for her to lean forward and capture his damp lips with her own. The red-and-white pill still clenched in her free hand, she stepped closer until she leaned and pressed herself entirely against his body, knee to knee, chest to chest. Understandably he stiffened, but when Sherry refused to relent in her irrepressible assault, his guard began to slip. Suddenly unable to control herself, her hand slid around to the back of his neck, threading her fingers through his silky hair and forcing his tentative lips deeper into her own. She distantly heard herself groan in relief and exhilaration, and she pulled back only to claim him again with more force. He tasted wonderful when her tongue softly prodded at his lips, clean but salty from his tears.

Her hand felt him tremble with uncertainty, but his mouth told another story as it gradually opened up to her. Satisfying her, his lips began to press back, just as hungry as her own but lacking the lust that gave her hunger power. Like the great detective he was, he investigated her and this unknown experience fervently, forcing himself to continue exploring with lips and tongue until he had a thorough understanding of this physical sensation that had always been an elusive mystery to him. He was hungry for knowledge, so hungry that with certain death only a swallow of a pill away, he would take the knowledge from whatever source would give it to him.

Nerves ablaze and stomach in knots, Sherry was reluctant to pull away, even as her lungs begged for breath. When she did, she groaned in disappointment and opened her eyes to watch him gasp for breath. His own gaze never fixed on hers, but on some thought he could only see in his mind. Lazily, she pushed herself off of him and stepped back a pace, running her hand through her hair. Her other hand clenched tighter on the pill.

"There…" she spoke, but had to breathe deeply several more times before she could continue. "There's one less regret, _meitantei_. How about that? I'd say that's a good deal, one less regret in exchange for your cooperation. Now… if you please… I have an experiment…"

"How can you do that?" He looked up at her, uncomprehending, and met her eyes. "How can you… kiss me like that, then turn around and kill me?"

For a moment, a very brief second, the person that her sister knew shoved Sherry aside in her mind, screaming for the scientist to stop this absolute madness. But Sherry was too strong right now. She flinched, then allowed a bitter smile onto her face.

"Because… I'm not Miyano Shiho."

For a moment, confusion was written across his face, but it softened into a tentative comprehension as he considered her insinuation. His expression changed once more, turning resigned and sober, as her fingers held the APTX-4869 up to his lips.

"There is only one truth," he pronounced quietly, and with the dignity of a hero, accepted the bitter pill and swallowed.

Clipboard in hand, she sat and observed as the poison took affect, noting the times that each symptom began. The sweating, the twinges… As before, she watched him thrash back and forth, screaming and groaning, sweat streaming down his face and soaked t-shirt. It seemed to last forever, despite the fact that her data sheet clearly proved that the minutes were relatively few. This time, however, when he hung hot, exhausted, and speechless in front of her, she was left cold. And when his fingers finally stopped twitching, her nerves tingled only unpleasantly. And when, after a time had passed, she approached him and pressed her head to his silent chest in search of a heartbeat, her stomach only twisted in sickened knots.

Upon recording the time of death in a quivering scribble, she let the clipboard drop from her hand and swiftly made her way back into the shadows.


End file.
